West Kelowna woman gets a bad tattoo in Las Vegas with a side of inappropriate touching

A West Kelowna woman is living with regret after a bad tattoo experience in Las Vegas.

For Jade, a pseudonym, a trip to Vegas was supposed to be a chance for her to bond with her 17-year-old son. He had been planning on getting a tattoo, and after the pair did a month's worth of research, they decided to go to Illuminati Tattoo Co. in Las Vegas on Sammy Davis Drive.

The shop came highly rated and she decided to get a tattoo on her thigh during the same session as her son.

"He did an absolutely fantastic tattoo on my son."

But when her turn came, things started to shift.

"He started my tattoo, and he left for about 20 minutes. I didn't understand why, but he came back and he was just different."

Jade says she thought he was giving her a break because the process was painful but he kept taking breaks and then coming back. Little did she know, the tattoo quality was deteriorating.

"I didn't know any of this, I was just trying to breathe through the pain, I couldn't even see it."

Jade says she couldn't see the tattoo during the process but her son started videotaping because he could tell something was off.

"At one point, he (the tattoo artist) came back — I've actually filed a police report — he came back and had a 'hard-on' and he was touching me inappropriately, pushing up against me."

Jade tells Castanet she filed a police report with the Las Vegas Police Department because of the inappropriate touching. But it wasn't until she went to pay that she realized just how bad her tattoo was.

"I absolutely freaked out and he basically just got up and walked out and never said anything."

Jade says once she got back to her hotel room and looked at her son's videos, she realized the artist was at times not even using ink. Fortunately, she didn't end up paying for either tattoo.

The video also shows the artist removing his gloves at one point, so Jade has had to get herself checked out by her doctor in Kelowna.

"I came back the next day and told the owner, the owner took a picture of it and basically said, 'I've fired him.'"

Jade says the owner told her the artist was a recovering drug addict who had been clean for eight months.

"I can't wear any of my dresses and just feel ashamed (the shop owner) he just said he would pay to have it removed, but he wasn't paying for anything else."

Jade says she can't afford to fly back to Las Vegas to have the tattoo removed and she will have to wait until it's completely healed before that can take place. The cost to remove a tattoo that size could range from $300 to $600 per session and take up to 10 sessions.

"I was sitting here and I thought, I just can't have this happen to anybody else. But I also have to try and fix this so I can live normally," Jade said.

"I've connected with lots of different tattoo removal places here just to kind of let them see it and get an idea. And they are just absolutely overwhelmed. They don't even know what to say they've never seen anything like this before," Jade says.

Jade has also now been in contact with the Kelowna RCMP and they have advised her to see a sexual assault counsellor and she has filed an official cross-border police complaint.

She says the RCMP told her the way she was tattooed constitutes an assault.