Photo of 4-Year-Old Tattooing Her Dad Stirs Debate
A tattoo shop owner and father is already teaching his daughter to ink, letting her try her hand at the family trade — at only 4 years old.
In a photo he posted on Facebook, Brad Bellomo shows his daughter, Chloe, tattooing a strawberry on his arm. The choice of design is an ode to her nickname “Berry Wu,” which was inspired by her rendition of “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” with the lyric “have you berry wu?” The photo, posted on Oct. 21, has received more than 117,000 likes and more than 13,900 shares.
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But a few Facebook users haven’t taken kindly to the image, reporting it to the social media site for graphic violence. “A Halloween costume with fake blood is more violent,” Bellomo tells Yahoo Parenting. “She’s just drawing on me, with a needle instead of a marker. There is no blood or anything like that.”
Chloe, who Bellomo says inspired him to open his own business, has always been an integral part of the 3rd Eye Tattoo Shop. The Florida store’s ceiling, which is covered in tiles with drawings from different artists, even showcases the preschooler’s work. “When she was one and a half, she was asking to make art for the shop,” Bellomo says. “She’s such a part of the business that I even call her, jokingly, ‘shop manager.’ She knows that when she comes in she needs to be a big girl and listen and be safe.”
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Bellomo says Chloe has been asking for permission to try tattooing for a while. “Some of my friends have 6-year-olds who I would not let near a tattoo machine, but my daughter has been exposed to this for a long time so she understands what it is. She knows it’s a needle, she’s seen me tattoo. It’s not a bloody process; I have a clean, light hand so it has never scared her,” Bellomo says.
A couple of weeks ago, he decided to give Chloe a test run, letting her try out the entire tattooing process without a needle. “I gave her the machine and gloves and set it up carefully, and made everything sterile so there was nothing that could possibly harm her,” Bellomo says. “I wanted to see if the machine was too heavy and if her hand moved around like crazy, so I let her pretend to trace tattoos I already had.” Bellomo says he expected that Chloe would get her fill and they’d try again in a year when she was more ready, but it turned out she had a steadier hand than he expected.
Last Wednesday, Bellomo prepped his daughter for the real thing. “I said, ‘Do you want to tat me for real?’ I thought it would be something special that she would be proud of,” he says. “I set everything up so that it was nice and clean, and to be sure it was safe, I was controlling the foot pedal, so that at any second if it seemed she didn’t have control or she was going to slip, I could turn the machine off. I was holding the machine with her, guiding her through the whole thing.”
The resulting tattoo — a slightly shaky outline of a strawberry — will eventually have a W resembling the Wu-Tang Clan symbol inside it (another ode to “have you berry wu?”), but Bellomo says an adult with a steadier hand will be doing that part. And while he’s the first to call his daughter a budding tattoo talent, he won’t force her into the family business. “She’s interested in it, so I’m not going to keep it from her, but I won’t say ‘You have to do tattoos when you grow up,’” he says. “I did this so that when she is older, it will be a nice bonding memory, and if her interest in it grows, that will be cool. But I don’t want to shove it in her face — the more you push, the more kids do the opposite. So I want her to grow with her art and see where it takes her.”
(Photo: Facebook/Brad Bellomo)
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