Tattoo Parlor

As the Westminster City Council moves closer to banning tattoo parlors from the downtown business district, local practitioners of skin decoration plan to bring Carroll County's first tattoo convention to Westminster late next month. The council could pass the ban before then. City officials said a zoning amendment should be introduced Jan. 8 and go to public hearing Jan. 22, when it could come up for a vote. Tattoo parlors would still be permitted in the industrialized business zone along Route 140, and an existing tattoo business downtown would be allowed to stay open, Mayor Thomas K. Ferguson said.

After undergoing treatment for breast cancer , Lillie Shockney, the administrative director of the Johns Hopkins Breast Center, had nipple reconstruction - twice. Despite the many shades of patients' skin tone, "The color choices for doing it in the hospital setting were beige, dark brown and the most common color, called 'salmon,' " Shockney said. She chose salmon and the result, she said, "looked like two pancakes. " Then she saw the work of Vinnie Myers on one of her own patients and went to him. When the procedure was finished, she looked in the mirror and burst into tears.

Howard County Executive Charles I. Ecker, already pushing for new restrictions against massage parlors and adult bookstores, has added pawn shops, tattoo parlors, striptease bars and fortune-tellers to the list of businesses he wants to restrict.Ecker, a Republican, wants to limit these businesses to general business zoning districts, mostly along U.S. 40 in Ellicott City and the U.S. 1 corridor from Elkridge to Laurel. Existing businesses would not be affected.Such restrictions are becoming increasingly common as suburban counties seek to limit the growth of businesses once found only in the downtown areas of major cities.

The 117-year-old Wantz Building on Westminster's Main Street, studded with unusual graffiti that blasts city government, has been sold to an Owings Mills restaurateur and developer who plan to convert part of the site into a doughnut store.The $530,000 sale to Robert Worgan, who owns the New Town Diner, and Garnet Bean, a real estate developer, was announced yesterday.Plans call for a $1.2 million renovation to begin immediately, said R. Douglas Mathias, executive director of the Greater Westminster Development Corp.

Quarterback Terrelle Pryor and four Ohio State teammates suspended for the first five games of the 2011 season apologized Tuesday for selling championship rings and memorabilia and taking discounts from a local tattoo parlor. The NCAA will permit all five to play in the Sugar Bowl against Arkansas on Jan. 4. Pryor, backup defensive lineman Solomon Thomas and starting tailback Dan Herron , wide receiver DeVier Posey and offensive tackle Mike Adams said they regretted their actions, which go back as far as two years.

Don't stare.But they want us to stare. Why else do they become human murals by tattooing their bodies in suits of permanent needle-point? All those lions and tigers and bears, oh my. And there's a guy with a leg tattoo of Moe, Larry and Curly and who makes Charles Manson look like Pat Boone.Stare away. The colorful subculture of tattooists is spending this weekend in Baltimore. They are not to be confused with the Maryland Real Estate Paralegals and the 1995 Black Family Conference, also meeting this weekend.

Ohio State football coach Jim Tressel has resigned, The Columbus Dispatch is reporting this morning. It's been less than three months since President E. Gordon Gee and Athletic Director Gene Smith said they fully supported Tressel. But new relevations -- seemingly daily, mounting pressure and a pending NCAA disciplinary hearing made it impossible for the university to continue its support of Tressel and the football program, sources told The Dispatch. The university announced the resignation after the newspaper's report this morning.

BLOTTER Police Blotter is a sampling of crimes from police reports in Baltimore City and Baltimore County. Baltimore City Western District Shooting/arrest: A 22-year-old woman was shot with a BB gun about 5 p.m. Monday in the 900 block of N. Monroe St. by a man who fled. By the time police arrived, the victim had gone into a house and retrieved a slapjack (which is similar to a blackjack), an act which prompted her arrest. Katrina Coleman, 22, of the 2000 block of Kelmore Road in Inverness, Baltimore County, was charged with possession of a deadly weapon.

THERE IS MUCH to like about reopening the Pikes Theater, a sentimental Pikesville landmark, as an Italian market.Baltimore County officials had been wondering what to do with the movie house, which the quasi-public revenue authority bought in 1992. The community tried to raise money for a performing arts center, but failed. Since then, development officials have considered turning it into a chic movie theater or a kind of Italian Sutton Place Gourmet.The theater idea was sentimentally appealing, but involved a $1 million subsidy.

Matt Porterfield's restless and moving "Putty Hill" is about a pocket of working-class Baltimoreans reacting to the overdose death of a 24-year-old man. It finds seductive underlying forms in what outsiders might consider shapeless lives. When skateboarders and BMXers streak up and down and over a course of concrete dips and valleys, and a teenager tags a wall with a spray-paint baroque version of "Rest in peace, Cody," they prove that they have poetry in them. The director doesn't impose his poetry on them.