Ever wonder what it’s like to be a Tattoo artist? To prod and poke people with needles and inject them with all colors under the sun, as they make the occasional, involuntary jerk from pain or shock or both, or a small sigh, waiting for your artistry to be done. I admit I’ve held a morbid curiosity for the craft, sometimes peeking into the dank and seemingly invite-only domain of tattoo parlors, with their heavily inked and metal-adorned inhabitants, red walls and black chairs, walls plastered with designs resembling dragons and demons, fairies, Celtic and Chinese symbols, and the odd, meaningless tribal mishmash of lines to be stamped on a woman’s lower back. My brother has a tattoo on his lower calf, in a rusted metallic palette, of a pentagram, that slightly demonic-associated symbol that actually traces its lineage back to ancient Greece and Babylonia, even among Free Masons, and is actively used among Wiccans today. I actually can’t remember if it’s enclosed in a circle or not (more accurately deemed a “pentacle”), but I do remember recommending a tattoo shop on Divisadero in San Francisco, a place that evenly fit the stereotyped and cliched image I have of tattoo parlors being mysterious and aloof, richly colored and hip with a strange juxtaposition of haughty and down to earth, and just, well, downright cool.

Well, needless to say, I didn’t get a tattoo that day, and I probably never will, but at least I can pretend to ink people’s skin with this cool iPhone game called Tattoo Mania by Handy Games. In this game you’re the owner of a Tattoo Shop – aptly called Tattoo Mania – that grows more popular by the second, often with customers waiting impatiently to get inked while you methodically tattoo someone else. The main screen shows the store front of Tattoo Mania in a dark, dusky setting with a Harley perched to the right and a stereo pulsating with generic hard rock music and that high-pitched, whining guitar so eponymous to the genre. To tattoo your customers, a brief shot of the tattoos location will be shown – sometimes this includes a fair close-up of abundantly illustrated breasts – and then the tattoo will be presented up close and personal for you to start zipping your finger around, smudging a line of color into the pre-traced tattoo outline. The colors change automatically if the tattoo is multi-colored, from green to red to grey-blue and black and sometimes pink or purple, and large red welts will appear wherever you strike the skin outside the prescribed tattoo path, leading to cries of pain and “ouch!” and “are you crazy???” from your customers. Throughout all this, of course, you listen blaringly to rock music from what I think the game calls “PAN radio.” Try not to injure your customers too much or you may find yourself fired and unemployed – it’s hard to find a good tattoo artist these days. To keep tabs on their pain threshold, a fire illustration on the left will fill with red, brimming to the top when your customer just can’t take any more of that buzzing, incessant needle. And, to make matters more difficult, some customers have a lower pain tolerance than others – this one woman wouldn’t stop shaking and screaming when I tatted her breasts. I’m a woman, I get it, they’re sensitive, so stop screaming and let me do my job!

To the right you’ll see a line-up of waiting customers, with impatient ones glowing red, indifferent ones yellow, and content to wait ones bright green. At any time you may swap out your customer for a raging red one, so you don’t risk losing a customer and, potentially, your job. I try to swap for the customers with more dollar bills by their moniker, because that’s more dough for my mojo. Keep the $1000+ price tag customers happy instead of out the door, and just politely seat the $200 rose job for later. It soon becomes apparent, however, that there are too many customers to handle, with several desperate “Swap me!” customers threatening to leave, and tattooing everyone successfully becomes a juggling game of musical chair proportions. After awhile, I found I wasn’t paying as close detail to the tattoos as before, just sliding my finger haphazardly around with quick up and down, left to right movements, before I switched to someone else and spent the same five seconds on him. If this is what being a tattoo artist means, quickly bumping out ink in some flesh assembly line, then maybe I don’t want to be a tattoo “artist” any more.

While fun and nice to look at, Tattoo Mania does get repetitive, and the only challenge is dealing with an exponentially growing horde of customers. $3.99 is a bit expensive for relatively no challenges other than the sweat you get from swapping customers. Every now and then you get a larger than average tattoo, requiring you to scroll around the screen with the controller on the bottom left, but that’s usually not a big deal. I wish there were some additional challenges, like speed rounds where you earn bonus points for finishing a tattoo as quickly as possible, or a customization mode, where you make your own tattoo and color it the way you want. It’d be great if the game had a character model for your player, and as collateral for working your arse off in the parlor, you’re awarded different tattoos as you progress in the game. You could upgrade your tattoo gun (mechanism, thing, what are they called?) into a quicker one, with the caveat being it’s more painful, or you could purchase a gun with more color options, so new clientele would come in. The game just needs a bit of color to add depth and dimension – and I’m not asking for much, just the depth of a tattoo.