'Do not drink and ink'

Miles Orff got this tattoo twice!
- Photo by Peter Holslin

Orff, the 29-year-old frontman of hardcore-punk band Coda Reactor, speaks from experience. Of the 25 or so tattoos he has, many were done when he was drunk, sometimes with surprising results.

When he was 22, after a long night of drinking, he stumbled into a tattoo parlor and had the artist ink a skull with an eyeball in its mouth on his left elbow. “And then I go home,” he recalls with a laugh, “and then I realize that I already have a skull with an eyeball in its mouth on my stomach. So, I got the same tattoo twice!”

Most recently, he was at The Tower Bar in City Heights when he decided to go to the parlor upstairs to have the word “showdown” inked on his left wrist, underneath a silhouette of a guy in a top hat smoking a cigarrette. But in his drunken haze, he ended up drawing an outline of “DOWNSHOW” in big, sloppy letters, and the artist happily obliged.

Orff’s biggest regret was letting an artist ink a poorly drawn devil on his shoulder when he was a teenager. But he also has serious tattoos. His favorite is on his right shoulder: A lady with a bird in her hand, the same tattoo his great-grandpa got when he was young.

“It’s actually our family tattoo now,” he says. “My uncle’s going to be getting it, and my cousin’s going to be getting it.”

Email peterh@sdcitybeat.com or follow him on Twitter at @peterholslin.