Tattoo show leaves its marks in Spokane

Steven Hamari drank from a juice box and sat bent over a trash can Saturday evening as two piercers stuck more than 60 hypodermic needles through his scalp.

The 27-year-old from Coeur d’Alene said he felt a little woozy after receiving the “crown of thorns” – a type of surgical, artistic piercing – at the Spokane Tattoo Expo.

“It’s not so much the pain,” said Hamari, who thought he might pass out during the procedure. “It’s the shock of needles going in.”

While Hamari’s piercing was temporary and for show, plenty of other expo attendees received permanent piercings or tattoos from artists based from Eastern Washington to Canada and beyond. Other tattoo aficionados showed up to compare ink and vie for trophies decked out with silver tattoo guns.

The event started Friday and runs through 8 p.m. today at the Spokane County Fair and Expo Center. Admission is $15, and those not interested in getting inked can watch a live sideshow and musical performers.

Between bursts of rock music from a stage near the beer garden, the inside of the center buzzed like bumblebees with the sound of tattoo needles.

Fifty-eight booths offered tattoo designs ranging from ghouls to old-school hearts pierced with swords, piercings of all sorts and supplies to care for fresh body art.

Several men strolled the hall with shirts off, displaying large hooks in their shoulder blades or new tattoos still oozing and covered with plastic.

Spokane resident Warren Keeney, 63, spent more than four hours receiving a black owl design on his upper right arm.

He received his first recent tattoo, a panther head sprouting from his lower arm, to cover a decades-old tattoo dating to his U.S. Air Force days.

“It was a chicken foot,” he said sheepishly.

Getting tattooed feels like a bee sting or a bad sunburn, Keeney said.

“Of course, it depends where you get it,” he said. “It doesn’t hurt like everybody thinks it hurts, generally.”

Keeney watched as his wife, Lynn, received a tattoo on her foot from the same artist – Dawn Marie Andersch, an employee of Hot Rod Tattoo in Spokane.

Andersch was booked for the entire expo, she said.

With much of his body tattooed with blue puzzle pieces and sporting two surgically implanted horns, The Enigma, a sideshow performer, drew audible gasps from his audience during a performance.

He interspersed songs with sword-swallowing, sucking a balloon in through his mouth and blowing it up through his nose, and running a power drill in and out of his nose.

While blindfolded, he used a chain saw to cut an apple clenched between his teeth.

And he lit a cigarette by shooting sparks – generated by an electric sander and a metal hatchet – into his face.

The Enigma, who declined to give his real name because of sideshow etiquette, has been featured on “The X-Files” and the Discovery Channel.

The Enigma described people with body art as a “giant family.”

“The scarier they are, the bigger their hearts,” he said, “because they have a release, they have a way to express themselves.”