Marking a Moment

Three years ago, a semiregular customer of Mario Barth's phoned him, crying.

"I need to talk to you," the man implored.

Barth has a two-year waiting list, but he met the distraught man at his tattoo shop in New Jersey. The man's wife had just died giving birth to twins. He wanted a tattoo on his arm, of rosaries, a cross and her maiden name.

Barth -- who runs the world's largest tattoo convention ever at Mandalay Bay this weekend -- understood how the man felt, to a degree.

Twelve years ago, a nephew of Barth's committed suicide. That same day, Barth, numb in grief, got his nephew's name tattooed over the center of his chest.

"You try to embed that feeling. I can get back to that feeling anytime I want to, just by looking at that piece," he says.

"I can take it with me when I pass away," he says. "I carry it with me all my life, to remember that there was somebody that important to me in my life that I put him on my body."

Barth, 43, recognizable partly for his accent, a mix of Austrian roots and Jersey upbringing, is a giant in his field. He's won competitions. He's inked Sly Stallone, Tommy Lee, Usher and other celebs.

He owns Starlight Tattoo in Mandalay Bay. But he spends a few days of each week tattooing nipple and areola hues on women who've finished breast cancer surgeries.

Barth has tattooed every tattoo-able part of people's bodies. Yes, every part.

The most painful area to get tatted, he says, are the less used parts of the body: under the armpit, knee bends and anywhere else "not exposed to outside bumps and rubs."

The least painful areas: "Somebody else's body," he jokes.

Few of Barth's own tattoos hurt getting inked. But his rear was different story.

"I didn't like that at all. At all. Especially the next two days, when you walk, and you're gonna sit down, then you're standing up. And everybody's like, 'Why is this guy going up, going down?' "

His most painful tats -- he got from Samoans using a traditional way of tapping bones, tipped in ink, on the skin.

"Those warriors can be tough."

The second-most painful tats -- by Japanese artists.

At first, "Japanese tattooing doesn't hurt, you can't feel it at all, you don't even know somebody's working on you.

"When it starts hurting, it's like somebody's stabbing you with a knife!" he says. "They have to lean on your body. They have to push it to create a bruise underneath, from the weight. So when they're working on you five, six hours, and they keep pushing on a soft part, you get that bruise."

Barth has undergone 210 hours of Japanese tattooing so far.

"The Samoan one was about four hours, which was enough for me," he says and jokes, "I cried inside."

Samoans and Borneo "headhunters" (who tat with spears) and Japanese tattoo artists will be among the most sought-after artists at this weekend's event.

"The hard-core fans are here for that."

There also will be artists skilled in scarification, when someone has star emblems and other steely shapes placed under their skin, so when you look at them, you see the raised shape.

Barth employs scarification artists in New Jersey.

"What those guys do -- I don't even want to see," he jokes.

This weekend promises 750 booths and more than 1,000 attending artists, plus seminars on everything from regular piercing to scarification implants.

But there'll be no tongue-splitting. It's illegal in Nevada.

The Guinness Book of World Records is sending someone to verify the event's scale.

Barth says people who get tattoos there should think about the experience of it.

"Too many people today decide the tattoo has to be an art piece. I have tattoos from people who never tattooed before. My father tattooed me. Vanilla Ice tattooed me. Friends tattooed me. For me, it means more -- the moment."

Doug Elfman's column appears Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays. E-mail him at delfman @reviewjournal.com. He blogs at reviewjournal.com/elfman.