The Regretful Scoop

I’ve got to get a scoop on tattoos? What’s a guy gotta do to get an easy story in these parts!

I guess old Scoop McGee doesn’t do easy. I get the hardest stories, I write the tough stuff, and I stake my reputation on the hottest scoops this side of the Pacific, see! Oh, and you know that dame jumping around the rooftops, the one everyone is calling the Night Valkyrie? That was me. Yep, old Scoop came up with the name, and no one remembers. No one, see! 

Now I’m having to write feature pieces for Tattoo Regret Bi-Weekly, a bi-weekly magazine all about people who regret their tattoos. Yeah, kinda says it all. 

Talked to a lady yesterday who went to a little old tattoo shop in Surfers Paradise, in the middle of her wild tropic holiday. Emotions were high, she thought she was in love with a spice merchant fella who smiled at her while she was buying six kilos of cumin, and she got a giant tattoo running from thigh to ankle that said ‘I LOVE SPICE MERCHANT GUY’. In between a load of sobbing, she told me that the tattoo artist asked her a few times if she wanted something different…but that’s what Queensland does to you, see? That magical place, it takes you away, makes you think strange things! I felt it once, back when I was just starting my career and I was hot on the case of a hot scoop, in hot, hot Queensland (this was in the summer). 

I almost got a tattoo myself! Think I ate some food so spicy it was like my mouth and insides had been carpet bombed, so I went right along to that tattoo parlour and asked them if I could get a tattoo on my left wrist that said ‘NYAH’ and one on my right that said ‘SEE’. Luckily, they talked me out of it, see? I used to talk so strangely back then!

I got the guy I was after, but this gal sure didn’t. She still has ‘I LOVE SPICE MERCHANT GUY’ written down the inside of her leg. Maybe try one of those Surfers Paradise tattoo shops, sweetheart. People do go nuts for the beach, but not in the same spice-laden, incense heavy way that you do in somewhere as magical as Surfers Paradise, see?

-Scoops