Barstool Sports

Philly.com –

Penny had never been to a tattoo parlor, like nearly all of the 2,000 women here before her. But she wasn’t as nervous as she had expected.

“Stand up for me, darlin’,” Vinnie Myers said.

He studied her breasts.

“There is some asymmetry, obviously,” said Vinnie. “So we’re not going to be able to get them exact.”

“I know,” she said. “But like my doctor told me, ‘They’re not twins, they’re sisters.’ ”

“That’s right,” laughed Vinnie, who is tall, trim, and always works in a porkpie hat, because he doesn’t want women staring at his shaved head.

Vinnie took a peach-colored Sharpie and drew concentric circles where the areola, the dark area around the nipple, and the nipple itself ought to be. First on her right breast, then her left.

“This is the main thing that you do?” Penny asked him.

“Yep. Just nipples. No more Tasmanian devils for me.”

Vinnie, 50, started out in Army boot camp tattooing serpents on soldiers. In the last decade, in a wonderfully American evolution, he has become almost a folk hero in the breast cancer world, saluted and admired by doctors and patients alike.

He has perfected the three-dimensional nipple tattoo, restoring a final mark of femininity to at least three women a day, who have come from as far as Saudi Arabia and Brazil to Vinnie’s Tattoo Parlor in a strip shopping center 30 miles west of Baltimore.

“His results are just so superior to what else we’ve seen, and I’ve seen nipples from all over the world,” said Marisa Weiss, founder of BreastCancer.org and a radiation oncologist at Lankenau Hospital. Many area hospitals are now using tattoo artists.

Vinnie charges $400 per client, what he feels is a fair price, and says that because of the Women’s Health and Cancer Rights Act of 1998, insurers will cover them, though often not without a fight.

The reader who sent this story in may have hit the nail on the head: this guy is doing God’s work. Nipple tats for mastectomy patients seems like a charity everybody can get behind. Nobody wants a world filled with nipple-less women. Hats off to Vinnie Myers for using his talent to do something positive for people.

Although this has got me thinking…there have to be discount nipple tattoo artists doing it for like half the price, right? Just going in there with the wrong color ink tattooing giant dark Big Berta braille nips on tiny blonde chicks and charging them $120. THAT’S the story I wanna see. Vinnie and his charitable realism is the bright side, but in this case the dark side of Sailboat Steve’s Discount Nipple Emporium is infinitely more interesting.

Also — do you think anybody just gets realistic nipple tats for the hell of it? Like on their back or arms? This article fails to answer the important questions. We need a follow up?