We hit the South Florida Tattoo Expo last night. I have a tradition now. I have to go, because if I don’t go, something awesome will be there and I’ll miss it. Otherwise, it’s the same old craptastic expo that it’s degenerated into. The hotel that is it hosted at now is not laid out well for an expo at all. There is one largish room, but there are at least four smaller (much smaller) rooms that many artists and vendors get relegated to. I have to wonder how much foot traffic they get, as they aren’t really near the main room and are kind of hard to locate if you don’t know the layout. We’ve gone to this particular hotel for the past few years and last night I wasn’t even sure if we had more rooms to peek into or if we had hit all of them.
Now that I am done bitching about the chosen venue… There were some great artists there last night, and some not so great. I guess it’s same group we see every year. As soon as we got there we stopped by the Ink Fixx booth and said hello. I got a silicon grip for my grip (to booth the size and absorb some vibrations – the size was the enticement for me!) and we both got a bad ass Ink Fixx tee. Then we walked around the main room, stopping at some booths. We stopped at King Pin and Michael got a new bottle of ink and some stencil stuff and priced some other things. We made our way the rest of the way around the room and then checked out some other rooms.
We ran into the lovely proprietors of Rockin Mamaz and had a great chat and got to catch up with some old friends (who knew!) and got some awesome swag. Malachai got a shirt, Dor & Esh got wrist cuffs, Michael got a shirt and I got a bad ass bag. I joked on the way home I’d rather spend 40$ on a purse from someone I know than 20$ on a purse from Target. *shrugs* Support local business!
We looped through the last room after that and then headed home. All in all? The money we spend to go in goes to charity (after expenses of course, but they routinely donate multiple thousands of dollars a year from this event) so it’s not a waste, and hey, we got to get awesome swag this year too 
Today is Malachai’s 7th birthday. He spent the morning helping to clean the living room (we’re having company tomorrow, and hey, he had a party last weekend) and is now playing Lego Batman with Dorian. I suspect it will be a low-key kind of day.
