Well, it’s tax refund season again.

Annnd stimulus check time…

Plus Matt finally hit his stride tattooing a few months ago.

In short, just like every other tattoo shop in the country, we’ve been busy. We get calls from clients wanting to know our walk-in availability daily. As hard as we’ve tried, we still get frustration from people who are either ignorant, too impatient, or generally rude regarding how walk-ins are supposed to work. We will take a bit of time to explain the way we and a lot of shops do things here:

The actual definition of a walk-in tattoo varies somewhat depending on who you ask. Some people think that a walk-in means that you can get tattooed right when you walk in. That’s usually not the case. The term Walk-in refers to any tattoo client who doesn’t have an appointment who wants to get tattooed that day. As such, if we have walk-in availability, it might not be for hours, but we can still get you in sometime that day, so that would be considered a walk-in.
Walk-in tattoos differ in complexity from tattoo appointment tattoos. Walk-ins tend to be simple, relatively quick affairs that can be done in a single, usually less than a couple of hours long session. Most tattoo shops, especially during this time, won’t have any availability longer than that any way, and then, usually only in a case where someone failed to show up for their appointment.
Call-ins are not walk-ins: This is probably the biggest point of contention we have with people (re: jackasses). People who call and ask if we have availability for walk-ins are told the same thing no matter what: YES. The reason we do this is several-fold. First, we have no idea what is going to happen during the day. People miss their appointments; tap out early; sometimes the artists overestimate the time needed to do a piece; sometimes artists are willing to stay late to accomodate people; tons of things can happen during the course of the day to change our availability. Some days are busy with lots of walk-in business, some days involve only tattooing our scheduled appointments and going home. Our boss tells us to tell everyone the same thing when they ask about walk-ins: Tell them to come in.
It’s simple mathematics: If we tell everyone to come in, only some of those people actually show up. Of the people that do show up, we can get some in, others will need an appointment Of the ones who need appointments, some will set an appointment and other will not. Of the ones who do not set an appointment, some will get angry and leave us a one star review on Google, which we will hilariously clown via this website due to that person’s rote ignorance.
If you get angry with us for telling you to come in and what you want requires us to schedule you an appointment in order to give you the best possible outcome, simply put, you’re a moron. You’ll also get barred from coming back to the shop. Ever.
Will threw three young ladies out yesterday because they all wanted to get tattooed as walk-ins, it took them over an hour to get here between the time they called and the time they arrived, and we were only going to be able to get two of them in that day for sure. The young ladies immediately expressed their displeasure about the situation, instead of thanking us for taking the time to take care of them. While Matt was drawing up the first piece another one of their group was calling other tattoo shops from our lobby. I’ll explain why this is a terrible mistake: It was obvious to us that if those girls found a shop that said they could all get tattooed that day they would leave, after having Matt already begin work for them, and go get tattooed together, without offering to pay Matt for his time. It’s happened before. WIll asked the girls to leave. They asked why and he couldn’t find the patience to explain to the girls the offensive nature of their actions and for those of you who don’t know Will, his bullshit tolerance has gone entirely to hell. The conversation wasn’t going to go well, so Will asked them to leave, again. They didn’t move. It was getting tense. This author can’t remember the next exchange but Will rather loudly expressed his distaste for these ladies and politely asked them to leave the fucking shop. Some people’s kids.
This amusing anecdote hopefully serves to explain that we have very little control over what other people are doing; when we are busy; what happens between the time you call and the time you came in; and any of a million other things that can impact when we can take walk-ins and when we can’t. Our solemn promise to you is that we will do our best to get everyone in that we can. Really. It’s also our contention that not everyone who calls or comes through the door is a good client and if you choose to mistreat us you’ll be asked to leave and not return. If you don’t understand these things you’re probably part of the problem.
To the rest of you who have cooperated so beautifully with us during this busiest of tattooing seasons: Thank you, we love you, and once it slows down a bit we will be announcing a big party to show our appreciation for you!

Those of us at Lighthouse Tattoo are doing our best to serve you. Please be patient with us and we promise not to let you down! Please remember the Golden Rule: Treat others the way you want to be treated, and we’ll get along just fine!