Tattoo seekers offer various motivations to get inked

From one booth to the next there was a buzz that sounded like an electric razor. People were staring intently at body parts. It would have been mostly quiet if not for the background music.

The scene Friday was the start of the third annual Salt Lake City International Tattoo Convention at the Salt Palace.

No one, however, was asking why someone would put a tattoo on his or her body — the artists and customers here had gotten past that.

"You could sit there and psychoanalyze all day long," said tattoo artist Bexx Miller.

She's done a bit of that herself.

"It's the most serious, serious form of self-expression," Miller said. "And I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing."

In her explanation of why, Miller, 33, talked about how we live in a transient world, how people throw away things all the time, how buildings go up and come down — an emphasis on the temporary.

She touched on how getting a tattoo might be a means in some people's minds to separate themselves from the animal world.

Miller added that since humans have been alive they have been looking for ways to decorate themselves.

In short, a tattoo is simply something beautiful that a person can wear forever, said Miller.

She talked while working on Kandi Zamora, who was getting another dragon tattoo, this one on her right arm.

Why dragons?

"I love dragons," said Zamora, 24. "They're very mythical."

Zamora has tattoos on her hip, ankle, upper back and one of a name on her lower back that she won't talk about.

Zamora's husband, Sam, 31, was a few feet away, getting a tattoo from Miller's husband, Ben. Sam's "full sleeve" tattoo was made up of skulls mixed into an industrial scene.

Husband and wife (being decorated) would pay husband and wife (doing the decorating) in the neighborhood of $800 for both tattoos.

One of Sam's more compelling tattoos is of a name, Miguel, someone Sam is eager to talk about.

"We were like brothers," Sam said of his cousin. The tattoo records Miguel's years on earth with the numbers '75, when he was born, and '97, when he was shot in the back of the head.