Seth snaps on teal-colored latex gloves and invites his canvas to have a seat. Beside him, on a paper-lined stainless steel stand like the kind surgeons use to keep their instruments handy, sit a Dixie cup filled with distilled water and a row of red caps, the size of toothpaste twist-tops, filled with black, red, yellow, green, blue, purple and white ink.

He has already threaded a clean set of needles into each of two tattoo machines. Three needles are grouped together and placed in one machine for outlining; five staggered needles used for shading fill the other machine. That’s what he calls it: the machine; calling it a tattoo gun is like calling your mother a whore. You must have respect for the machine.

April, a dark-haired 28-year old, comes around the chest-high counter that separates Seth’s five-by-six-foot workspace from the rest of the tattoo shop and pushes through the skull-and-crossbones-shaped swinging doors. She turns her back to Seth.

"I want it here," she says, reaching over and tapping her shoulder blade. "Will it hurt here?"

"The general rule," he says, "is that anywhere it feels good to be licked it’ll really suck to get tattooed."

April considers this a moment by chewing on her lip. "Okay, yeah. Just do it there then," and sits in front of Seth to have the transfer of a garden fairy applied.

"Do you get a lot of people asking for tattoos in sensitive places?" asks April’s blonde friend who gives her emotional support from the other side of the counter.

"The only thing I haven’t tattooed is a penis," says Seth. "And that’s probably because I have a $500 handling fee."

Seth’s nickname is Easy Road. It’s stitched on his shirt lapel and tattooed across his knuckles in old-fashioned barber shop-style bubble letters. It represents the kind of life he felt he’s had. Good things just fall into his lap. He met the right girl at the right time who introduced him to the right people who were willing to give him an apprenticeship when he was just 19 — ridiculously young by tattoo-industry standards. He practiced on grapefruit, then gullible friends, taking notes from his mentor who had a national reputation as a portrait tattooist. Seth has traveled across the country and been able to make a living tattooing. There’s nothing else he wants to do. He happily tells people that if he couldn’t tattoo he’d die. Now he is the full-time go-to guy at Sacred Art tattoo shop in Oregon.

Easy road also represents his comfortable childhood as a middle class military brat. Seth didn’t grow up silver spoon, but unlike many of his friends, his parents never divorced, he never had someone close to him die, and he was never abused. Sure, his dad could be moody. He’d even hit Seth once or twice as discipline. But Seth admires him: a good man who took his family to church every Sunday and helped the kids in the neighborhood get their Boy Scout "God and Country" badges.