CROTHERSVILLE — Beauty from Ashes tattoo parlor closed its doors to paying customers Saturday in order to accept a different kind of currency.
Ink could only be bought with canned goods, and it was a big day for Andrew Wilson. He got his first tattoo.
"I've been thinking about it for a while and then heard about the canned food drive, and I was like, why not, it's for a good cause," Wilson said. "There's no other way I would rather spend my Saturday."
Wilson learned about the Food for Tattoos event, organized by the I Care Ministry in Seymour, through Facebook. His load of food was so heavy that he used a laundry basket to carry it.
A line began forming at 7:30 a.m. at the Jackson County tattoo parlor and continued to grow until 11:30 p.m. Saturday.
"Brining 50 canned goods. It's work to get the tattoo, but then again, you are feeding other people," Farron Dyer said.
Dyer runs the I Care Food Pantry with his wife, Raven. The pantry decided to team up with the parlor in 2018.
"They called me and asked me if they could put a box in front of our counter to basically just take donations if people came in to get a tattoo," Kyle McIntosh, who works at the parlor, said. "And I thought about it and I didn't know how many people would just stop by a grocery store just to pick up cans. So I thought, I don't know how effective that'd be. What if we just did tattoos for a whole day?"
From there, an epic idea was born. The first Food for Tattoos event brought in 18,000 canned goods, and this year could top that.
