Those of us who have had tattoos were finding this story slightly unbelievable – in the literal sense… Here is what is supposed to have happened: a teenager by the name of Kimberley Vlaminck walks into a tattoo parlour and is attended by a (very) heavily tattooed and (very) heavily pierced tattoo artist in Belgium. She apparently does not speak the same language as him and struggles to convey her wishes to have three (three, not four, not 56…) stars on her cheekbone. She then lay on the treatment couch and proceeded to fall asleep (yes, fall asleep…). She woke up to pain on her nose – or so we were given to understand – looks in the mirror and freaks out when she sees a total of 56 (fifty-six) stars covering a full half of her face. Apparently she said: “When he started the tattooing I didn’t want to feel the pain and so I went to sleep. I had got up at five in the morning”. Hmmm.
Here’s where the story fell apart… nowhere were we told whether she actually freaked there and then or only did a post-dad-freaking-out freak. Do you see what I mean? Did she only actually begin to panic and think perhaps she had made a terrible mistake when she saw her father’s reaction? We were told her father reacted rather volubly, after all.
The real problem is that she told one story and the artist told another. Tattoo artist Rouslan Toumaniantz denied she fell asleep. “She was awake the whole time, I don’t use hypnosis or drugs. She agreed to it. The problems started when her father and his friend saw the tattoos”.
The police investigated the matter and decided there was nothing to prosecute the artist for. The artist has decided that from here on in, he will be asking people to sign a consent form before being inked, which is not a bad idea, all things considered.. Said teenager, who is actually 18 and a housewife, we were told, then decided to sue the artist for the removal fees and all the while we were expected to believe she slept through the tattoo being inked onto her face? Errr. Nah. It took her a week, but she finally came clean. It was her dad that saw stars, after all…
