By New York Post (U.S.) | Created at 2025-01-07 23:23:14 | Updated at 2025-01-08 19:31:10
20 hours ago
An Arizona tattoo artist is under fire for inking a 9-year-old girl with an American flag — but he insists he actually helped her out and doesn’t support kids getting tats.
The co-owner of Black Onyx Empire Tattoo — who goes by Sosa — shared an Instagram post saying the girl rolled into his Yuma shop with her sister and parents last May and asked for a tattoo of President-elect Donald Trump on her neck.
In Arizona, kids are allowed to get inked so long as consenting parents are present.
Sosa said he tried to “scare” the girl and family away from the very permanent decision by charging them $500 for what would have otherwise been an $80 tat.
They were undeterred, however, and Sosa talked them out of the Trump neck tat for an American flag on her arm. In early January, the girl came back to get the red-retouched on her flag and Sosa obliged.
“Anyways what do you guys think?” he wrote in the Instagram post.
Many were more than willing to share what they thought.
“Please no. As an artist, be the bigger person and don’t do this to a 9 year old. Then call child services,” wrote one commenter responded on a YouTube video about the story.
“I’m heavily tattooed and I believe anyone involved in this should be prosecuted and put in jail,” said another.
“You shoulda talked yourself out of even entertaining the thought. You can’t control the parents but you can control your own actions and should have refused service,” added another, while others called Sosa “disgusting” and said he should be “ashamed” of himself.
But Sosa, who says he’s been “getting threats” and “hate comments” since he shared the story, insists he was acting in the girl’s best interest.
“She was going to get it done regardless. She said it didn’t matter if I did it or someone else did it, she was going to get it done,” he told The Post Tuesday.
“And I thought, ‘You know what, in a sterile, clean environment…'” he said, adding that he was afraid another artist might allow her to go through with the Trump tattoo on her neck, too.
Sosa said he also felt obligated to do the tattoo when her parents accepted the higher price without blinking — and that once he heard their story he felt a bit better about it.
“They were from Turkey, and they came as refugees over here. So they would really appreciate the opportunity that they got to be in the United States,” he said, explaining that she wanted the Trump tattoo as an expression of their gratitude to the country.
“It was like a cultural thing,” Sosa said, noting that her older sister — now 18 — had also gotten a tattoo when she was 9. “Would I do it again? Probably not. However, I was moved by the story they had.”
“Do I think it’s right? No,” Sosa said, adding that he’s never tattooed a child before and thinks the law should forbid it.
“I’m not tattooing kids every day, that was the first, it’s going to be the last. I have three kids — one’s 12, one’s 7, and one’s 4. None of them have tattoos,” he said. “I don’t think tattoos on kids is the right thing to do. I think laws should be made. I think a ‘Sosa Law’ should be made, because I posted it. There should be an age limit.”
Whatever his intentions, some in the business still think Sosa should have said no — and that artists like him give their profession a bad name.
“It is one of the most frustrating things about our career field and in Arizona where it has no regulations,’ Ben Shaw of the Alliance of Professional Tattooists told AZFamily, which broke the story.
“It can give us professionals a bad reputation. If you see a 10-year-old child with a professional tattoo and they say they got it at a tattoo shop, that degrades us as a whole,” Shaw said.
