Ink-Stained and Loving It

IT’S hard to look authentically rebellious or menacing these days, when even well-behaved businessmen wear earrings and ponytails and college students destined for quiet suburban lives have body piercings and tattoos.

Tattoos, in particular, are not the radical brandings, the bold violations of flesh and propriety, they once were. Available in New York from almost 1,400 licensed tattoo artists, tattoos are probably better and safer now than they’ve ever been — more creative and varied, applied in many cases by serious, highly skilled body artists.

Then again, there are tattoos, and there are tattoos. It is unlikely that the ambitious professional with a single, understated, discreetly placed and wittily conceived tat, or for that matter the teenager from Queens with her boyfriend’s name and two lovebirds emblazoned in the small of her back, will ever have tattoos on the face and scalp, or a full chest or back “panel” or a tattooed arm or leg.

There is, in short, a line beyond which the dabblers do not go. The marvels (and murals) of tattooing that lie beyond that line were on gaudy display this weekend at the Roseland Ballroom, on West 52nd Street near Eighth Avenue, where the 11th annual New York City Tattoo Convention ends tonight. A few thousand attended last year.

For three days, the sidewalks around the old ballroom are filled with many of the most heavily and elaborately tattooed people in the New York area.

Inside the ballroom, working tattooers, including some from Europe and Asia, occupy 70 booths. “I don’t just let anybody in, like a lot of conventions do,” said Steve Bonge, a 49-year-old East Village resident and one of the convention’s principal founders. “Maybe there are bigger shows, but I know I get the best of the best.”

Even the tattooless are welcome at the convention. But those with bare skin may find it hard not to gawk at the hard-core collectors for whom showing copious ink is what it’s all about. These folks have transformed large portions of their bodies into multicolored canvases for all manner of skulls, serpents, raptors, flame-breathing dragons, flowers, vines, angels, demons, daggers, buxom bombshells and portraits of heroes and loved ones. For these folks, tattoo remorse is not an issue.

On that point, Mr. Bonge, a photographer, part-time bartender and Harley-riding Hells Angel whose entire back is inked with a 1940s pulp fiction image of a knife-wielding villain seizing a blonde against a cityscape, noted that the one- or two-tat dilettante and the major collector have one important thing in common. “It’s a commitment,” Mr. Bonge said. “Even if you don’t want it, it’s still there.”

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