A tattoo parlor just opened at the end of my street and has been doing a land-office business. I figure that since our neighborhood had been without a tattoo establishment for several months, the under-40 crowd had been experiencing acute needle withdrawal.</p><p>As it turns out, I missed the grand opening because I was in California, where among the things I visited was High Voltage Tattoo, the West Hollywood body shop made famous by the TLC reality series &ldquo;LA Ink.&rdquo; </p><p>Young adults are flocking to tattoo parlors in record numbers; a Pew poll in 2006 found 36 percent of people in their late 20s were sporting one. Talking about tattoos as a subculture is as pass&eacute; as discussing the organic food subculture or DVR subculture.</p><p>So in 2005, when TLC and A&E had a race to see which cable channel could get a tattoo series on the air first, you knew these weren&rsquo;t going to be shows about aboriginals or bikers. </p><p>In fact, both were set at retail shops where you were more likely to bump into a soccer mom than a bicep &ldquo;Mom.&rdquo; </p><p>The parlor featured in A&E&rsquo;s &ldquo;Inked&rdquo; was in a Las Vegas casino, where high rollers and middle-class tourists waited their turns to get painted. TLC&rsquo;s &ldquo;Miami Ink&rdquo; took place on that city&rsquo;s fashionable South Beach, and it showed from the clientele that walked in the doors.</p><p>Each series churned out dozens of episodes and spawned a spin-off. A&E followed up with &ldquo;Tattoo Highway&rdquo; earlier this summer, with &ldquo;Inked&rdquo; shop manager Thomas Pendleton taking his practice on the road in a restored 1970s touring bus, along with his wife and several colorful artists. The first &ldquo;Tattoo Highway&rdquo; showed a woman asking for something to memorialize the son she had given up for adoption and considered &ldquo;lost.&rdquo; </p><p>The son was watching the show. He&rsquo;s not lost any more.</p><p><strong><span class="subhead">A spin-off, of course</span></strong></p><p>The other spin-off was &ldquo;LA Ink,&rdquo; and it came about the way things often do on TV: through a casting decision. </p><p>In &ldquo;Miami Ink&rsquo;s&rdquo; first season, the producers needed a female to break through all the testosterone. The store was run by two men. </p><p>And did they ever find one in Katherine Von Drachenberg, now known as Kat Von D, a 22-year-old Mexican-American wunderkind who displayed a cool hand with the needle and a personality that could be, let&rsquo;s say, <em>caliente</em>. She clashed often with owner Ami James, and while the cameras and fans loved these scenes, James eventually fired her.</p><p>But he wasn&rsquo;t running the show; TLC was. The network approached Kat Von D about having her own reality series back at home base on the West Coast. </p><p>She found a small shop on La Brea and adorned the walls with merchandise from her personal collection: guitars, skateboards, Kiss action figures, black velvet portraits of celebrities. There were life-size Simpsons figurines in the bathroom (mostly so they wouldn&rsquo;t show up on camera &mdash; copyright issues). Right in the middle of everything she hung a ghastly red chandelier that could&rsquo;ve been stolen from Elvira.</p><p> She hand-picked her artists and settled in to do business her way. </p><p>In its first season, &ldquo;LA Ink&rdquo; scored almost double the rating of the Kat-free &ldquo;Miami Ink,&rdquo; and that might have been the last straw for the proprietors in South Beach. When TLC came to renew for a fifth season, they said no thanks. James told the Miami Herald, &ldquo;We weren&rsquo;t happy with the way we were treated.&rdquo;