247 Ink Magazine (August/September) 2017 Issue#16 | Page 162

thoughts that were discour- aging and he it shouldn’t matter and to try it any- way. So I did. I was doing it in September and it was alongside a motorcycle rally. There was a couple hundred thousand people in town like a Sturgis (ND) or Day- tona event. But they didn’t want to come in the door, they didn’t want to spend the money, they weren’t getting tattooed. We did two years of that and it got to the point where it just wasn’t growing and we weren’t get- ting the attention we want- ed. We ended up moving it to the middle of August. Once we did that, the town is full of people on vacation, people that are tattoo fans can’t walk down the boardwalk with- out seeing heavily tattooed males and females. They’re already in town so if there’s a convention here it might do better. It’s been quite a bit differ- ent and successful since we moved it. This is your eighth year? Yeah, this is our eighth year. How did Troy and Villain Arts get involved? Well after the first two years of doing it the guy who was the guest artist and a friend of mine, Tony Olivas, who has a good name within the indus- 160