“IAMTA2S” This license plate adorned one of the many vehicles that sat outside the Ramada Plaza Hotel in Wilkes-Barre PA the weekend of September 3-5 during the 11th Annual Inkin’ the Valley Tattoo and Sideshow Gathering. This is just a small sample of the all encompassing lifestyle that you enter into when you attend a tattoo convention.

Stepping into the cozy Ramada, we were greeted by the oddities that the Sideshow brings with them - pickled and preserved animals that have since left the living world, only to be idolized and travel the country in glass cases, an armadillo that holds his own beer bottle, a two-headed duckling that had a heck of a time trying to decide if he was going to cross the road or not at one time, and the classic jackrabbit that walks on chicken legs, has antlers like a baby fawn, and can shake his tail feathers as well as an Indian attempting to call down rain in the middle of a drought.

Elsewhere in the hotel, other oddities were performing; the on-stage acts competed with each other to see who could put themselves in the most pain. Would the winner be the act that glued a bowling ball to his hand and ripped it off, along with a few layers of flesh, the announcer that had a bull’s eye tattoo on his back that volunteers from the audience threw darts at, or would the show-stopper be the soul that adorned bowling pins as earrings and attached a bowling ball to his nipple piercings and swung it around. I believe the winner was declared as the one that could make the most members of the audience flinch.

And it is pretty hard to make these show-goers flinch! They are the patrons of the Tattoo Convention that take hours out of their lives to spend sitting in a chair getting a needle-tipped machine to draw art on the most vulnerable parts of their bodies. Inkin’ the Valley is one of the longest running conventions that we have attended so far, and the one that receives the most hype from the local tattoo community as being THE show to be at, but is at the same time the smallest convention that has graced the P&OM pages. After checking out the Harley that was being given away by Noto’s Harley Davidson, we decided to call it a day and let the “TA2S” party through the night. You can check out the dates for the 2005 show at www.inkinthevalley.com.