A Truly Accomplished Day

Yesterday can only be defined as a truly accomplished day for Duc and I. It started out simply accomplishing things that we had set out to do that day, which included me getting my hair cut, spending a little personal time at Spa Belle and stopping at our favorite book street vendor who always has the newest cookbooks at a much discounted price. It was also a gorgeous day just to walk around and take a little exercise. There was also a nice street fair to kick the summer off just right. Not one of those “everything is the same” street fairs but more of an art fair.

Then as planned we made our way to the New York City Tattoo Convention held this weekend at the Roseland. I hadn’t been to the Roseland since the mid-90s when I saw Toad the Wet Sprocket perform. I was also supposed to see SoundGarden perform there but I had tickets for the night the band broke up.

So Duc and I had agreed that we were just going to walk around the convention and look at some artist’s books and just have fun for a couple of hours. However, we did have one wish. Many many years ago Duc and I met a Tattoo artist named Cheeky that did tattoos for both of us. He did my Krillin DragonballZ tattoo on my left shoulder and he did a tiny dragon tattoo on Duc’s right chest (because Duc wasn’t sure if he would be able to take the pain of tattooing) and then a very big dragon tattoo on his left chest flowing to his back. Needless to say we absolutely love Cheeky’s skill and artistic ability plus he’s just a really nice guy.

As the story goes the owner of the shop he worked in sold the place and Cheeky moved on. Unfortunately, the new owners weren’t interested in helping us find him so we were simply out of luck and lost our favorite tattoo artist. Now some of you might be saying “with a name like Cheeky couldn’t you find him on the Internet?” Well not really, you see Duc and I couldn’t really agree on what his name was. I thought it might be Chicky. Duc thought it might be Checky…needless to say the Internet can’t help unless you have “someone with a little bit of information” (family joke) and that simply wasn’t us.

So our wish was that maybe just maybe he’d be at the convention working a booth. It had been over six years since we had seen him last (maybe even more) and he was very young back then. Well everyone was younger but thinking back on it now I think he was eighteen at the time he did our tattoos. So we really weren’t sure what he’d look like. We had a vague idea but time adds in a lot of factors. As we walked around I saw someone who kinda looked like him at one of the booths but after I starred for a long time we concluded it wasn’t him so we moved on.

Then as we were literally four booths before the exit I saw this guy pass by me with a white ink tattoo on his neck and knew immediately it was him. I turned and said “Chicky?” and he turned around and saw us. We couldn’t believe it, our wish had come true. I know it sounds silly but anyone who has a good relationship with their tattoo artist understands our feeling. So he gave us his info, website and the right spelling of his name. He checked out our tattoos to see how they had aged and we left the convention feeling completely accomplished. If you want to check out Cheeky’s website go to http://www.cheekynewyorkink.com/