Shopping for Shoes, Jeans ... and Tattoos?

Daredevil Tattoo customer Matt Etchemendy said he doesn't shop at Bloomingdales.

Tattoo Nation is now offering to ink customers in a less than traditional setting -- a mall.

(ABC News)

"If there's a sale, I guess," he said, quickly changing his mind again. "No, still no."

Tattoo artist "Big Steve" Perone echoed his customer's sentiments.

"I don't go to malls because I don't want to deal with the people like that, you know what I mean?" he said. "Nothing's wrong with them, I just don't want to deal with them."

Diluting a Treasured Art?

Brad Fink, the co-owner of Daredevil and a big name in the tattoo world, said he used to fret about the mall-ification of his passion.

"Romantically, I think a lot is lost, but that's too far gone to worry about," he said.

He said he also worries that what might be missing at the malls is the art.

"It's not like being trained at Starbucks to be baristas. It is not computer-generated work. It is work being done by humans on humans," Fink said. "If you're getting a tattoo you need to scrutinize people's portfolios and do your research. You need to go on the Internet and find endless amounts of great tattooers."

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Getting a tattoo, he said, should not be like window-shopping -- not like it is occasionally at Tattoo Nation, where Wolfson said he was surprised that many customers are impulse shoppers.

So what do the artists at Tattoo Nation think of the complaints from the purists?

"I don't really care," Tattoo Nation artist Matt Montleon said. "I come to work and I do tattoos. I deal with my clients just like I would at any other shop."

And there were other considerations.

"I have a wife and kid and I need the health insurance," he said. "The opportunity came up, I took it. I like it."

Tattoo Nation's artists get benefits and vacations, something that's virtually unheard of in the mostly cash, mostly freelance world of tattoo parlors.

But Freeman doesn't care about that. She cares about her Celtic thistle.

"It's beautiful!" she told artist Dan Castellano, after seeing the finished results. "You totally nailed it right on the head."

And when it was all said and done and paid for, where was Freeman heading next?

"Bloomingdales," she said, laughing. "And we're gonna go to Lord and Taylor's."