Tomato Tattoo

Quality tattoo shop. Always have the best artists with excellent portfolios and always CLEAN. I got my first tattoo here years ago and have recommended them to as many people as I possibly can. If you are looking for a great clean shop, with excellent artists you don't have to look any further than Tomato.

I'm crestfallen to write this review and I really hope it was just an "off" day, but I'm a little miffed about my experiences with Tomato Tattoo this afternoon.

Let me preface this to say that I have experience with body piercing and tattoos, much to the revulsion of my mother. She's come around over the years, and when she decided to get her ears pierced again, she came to me with advice on what to do. She decided that for her birthday, we'd get her ears pierced.

Enter Tomato Tattoo! I'd chosen the parlor in part because of its sterling reputation (and the reviews of you lovely Yelpers) and in part because of a conversation I'd had with Jason, the piercing guy. He was then and today bright, funny, personable and very talented. Just the guy to put my poor mum at ease, I thought!

But when we went in, the gentleman I spoke to (NOT Jason, by the way) was very dismissive and, how to put it politely... spacey. I'd explained what I'd like to do, and he said "Well, to do it here, it'd be very expensive." I said I don't care what the cost, I want my mother in the best hands. He shot me a look and went on to say, "For what you want, I'd tell you to just go to Claire's and have a teenager do it."

...
WHAT.

You've got to be fucking kidding me.

I would rather be gored by an angry bull than let my mother go anywhere near a teenager with a piercing gun. There's a litany of reasons why, but basically the machine is unchanged from what's used to tag the ears of cattle, which is to say it shoots a rod of metal through the ear with an impact similar to blunt force trauma. It leads to possible splintering of the metal and an increased rate of infection. Worst of all, certain parts of the machine cannot properly be sterilized in an autoclave. So no thanks, I'd rather not have my mom get a mini bullet shot through her ears by a teenager with five minutes of orientation.

Worst still when I'd asked him when the last spore test was done for the autoclave, he didn't even know what a spore test was.

I'm really hoping he was joking and I just didn't get it. Or maybe he was having a rough day. But when I went to another nearby parlor, when I even mentioned this story to the owner, she pulled out a giant binder with records from every spore test they'd ever had, performed each month, before I even asked.

Hope this was a one-off, rare experience. But dude... Learn the fucking sterilization process.

Why isn't 0 stars a choice?  I would choose 0 in a heartbeat if I could because that is the level of service I got from Tomato Tattoo.  I went in seeking a tattoo to cover an old tribal I have on my thigh about a year ago.  I talked to a guy who was working up front.  He stopped working on someone's tattoo to ask me what I wanted.  As I was describing it to him he went back to working on the tattoo.  Not only was he not paying attention to me...he was half-@ss paying attention to his work.  I explained I wanted a tree design that went up my hip and branched a bit onto my stomach.  This would have been a high price piece!  He kept trying to convince me to do a realistic tree and that wasn't what I was looking for.  When I told him what I wanted he smirked at me and said "whatever" in a tone that made me immediately decide never to get work done there.  They should change the name to Rotten Tomato Tattoo.  What a joke.  Pathetic.