True story: When I was getting work done on my first jag (the yellow one), this kid came into the shop wanting to see about getting an armband done that he had drawn up. It was a poor rendition of a medal of some kind with a multi-colored rendition of a red, white and blue ribbon going around the arm with a star in the middle of it. It was pretty crappy looking, actually. Anyway, he wanted to know if my ink guy could do it, so my inker stops working on my tat for a minute, looks at the guys hand-drawn flash and says "Why do you want that?". The kid looks at him and goes "Because it looks f**king cool, man!". My inker goes "I can definitely do that for you and make it look kick ass.", to which the kid replied "Awesome! How much?". My tat artist didn't even blink and tells the kid $800. I coughed when he said that but didn't say anything. The kid goes "Okay, cool. When can you do it?" and books a time to have it done. When the kid left I just started laughing and said "You're going to charge that dumbass $800 for that thing?" and he says "People who want crappy tattoos and don't have any real deep meaning for doing so deserve to be ripped off. If he'll pay me that much money to do a boring armband that's lame and doesn't mean anything to him in the first place, then I'll gladly do it for him but I'm damn well going to be compensated for having to work on something so f**king stupid in the first place." That's when I learned that my ink got special attention from him because not only was it different and more of a challenge than a lot of the crap that he had to work on, but because it has some very deep seated spirituality behind it for me. He appreciated that (and probably gave me a break on the price because of it).