Beyond skulls and butterflies

By AIMEE NEISTAT
Tel Aviv-based tattoo artist Roey Pentagram has had customers with unusual requests. Some have asked for the number tattooed to a parent's arm during the Holocaust. "Usually the [customer's] parent died, and this is their way of immortalizing them. The number is a memento. The first connotation of this type of tattoo is negative. But for the customer, it's part of who their parent was," said Pentagram. Pentagram did the first of these tattoos about eight years ago. Another customer requested a picture of a crab on his chest. Usually when people ask for a crab, it's because their astrological sign is Cancer. But not this man. He had just recovered from cancer and got the tattoo as a symbolic way of keeping cancer (the Hebrew word "sartan" is the same for the disease and the star sign) outside of his body, not inside.