Pet tattoos offered at discount rate in Durham charity event aimed at dog shelter
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- Durham tattoo artist offers discounted pet portraits to support dog rescue.
- Proceeds go to Hope Animal Rescue, a nonprofit aiding abandoned and injured dogs.
- Pet owners must submit photos by August end for a chance at a custom tattoo.
In his portrait of a pitbull named Riot, Brian Parrillo took such care with detail that you can see the whiskers sprouting from the dog’s jowls and the moisture glistening on its nose — a tribute he lovingly tattooed on its owner’s arm.
His gallery of work from Ethereal Tattoo Gallery in Durham includes a Chihuahua named Boris, a bulldog named Arnie and a feral cat with a snipped ear, work he counts among his favorite and most emotional pieces.
“Tattooing things that people love and miss is really special,” he said Thursday. “It’s hard to express how it makes you feel that people are choosing you to document these things that mean so much to them.”
So this week, Ethereal Tattoo thought of a way to combine devotion to animals with exquisite ink design: a charity tattoo event that benefits Hope Animal Rescue, a Durham volunteer group dedicated to saving abandoned dogs.
The idea: Submit a picture of your beloved fur baby by the end of August and Parrillo will choose two to tattoo at a discounted rate, donating the money to the Hope rescue. Each will cost an estimated $800, which is tax-deductible.
“He loves doing this,” said Annika Hugosson, Ethereal’s shop manager. “A big part of this is he gets a lot of these requests, but the photos look like they were taken on a relic of a camera from long ago. Having the highest-quality reference photo makes for the highest-quality tattoo. He goes in and plays with what he has in Photoshop to get the fur detail.”
For the neediest dogs
The idea mirrors a similar campaign from a tattoo gallery in New York, and it also supports the Hope group that Hugosson worked with during her own stint working in animal rescue.
Their online adoption page features hard-luck dogs like Star, a pitbull who survived an attempt to dump her off a bridge, and Hattie, a “North Carolina Brown Dog” who was stray until this year.
“They take a lot of dogs that nobody else would,” Hugosson said. “There were dogs who came in with injuries that needed surgery right away.”
As shop manager, she can more than identify with the urge to immortalize a favorite pet on arm or leg, an inky reminder of a unbreakable connection. She has one of Parrillo’s first pet portraits herself: Franklin, the first of her four brindle pitbulls.
“For me,” she said, “it’s more than just about him in some ways because I chose the photo — not the best photo, not the cutest photo — but I chose the photo that was the shelter listing. Kind of his online profile if you will.”
Parrillo, meanwhile, has been drawing animals since childhood, starting with a deer and gravitating toward “animals that I admire.” When he tattooed Riot, the pitbull, “That was the first one that made me feel like I’m getting good at this.”
When this charity tattoo event is done, perhaps another unfortunate dog, a lonesome and hurting wanderer who found a home, will live on through Parrillo’s hands — staring back with dewy, lovestruck eyes.
To submit a pet photo for the charity tattoo event, go to https://www.brianparrillo.com/charitypetportraits.