DAN WEISMAN Staff Writer ESCONDIDO At the corner of Pain Street and Pleasure Road ---- at least that's what the wall signs said ---- Eva Phoenix and company at the Art Throb tattoo parlor were busy transferring their arts backgrounds onto their latest canvasses: ankle and back flesh. Phoenix was featured recently in Savage Tattoo magazine, a national tattoo industry publication. The thrust of the story was the changing face of tattoos, which is becoming more mainstream as tattoo artists with fine arts backgrounds such as Phoenix become more popular. "Tattoos are a way for people to express themselves in a more primal way," said Phoenix as she and Johnny Loveless, her husband and Art Throb co-owner, prepared for a busy day at the 611 East Valley Parkway office in the shadow of Palomar Medical Center. "We're so homogenized in this country, but a lot of other cultures have their coming-of-age ceremonies and reveal their primal urges with tattoos," Phoenix said. "They've even found tattoos on the 3,000-year-old 'Iceman' in the Italian mountains ... and on the steppes of Mongolia." Phoenix and Lawless opened Art Throb in May 1997 after working for some time at another shop in Encinitas. Escondido has four tattoo shops, which Phoenix estimated do upwards of $250,000 of business annually. The region has about 40 tattoo parlors. Art Throb charges $100 an hour for tattoos with custom jobs taking 90 minutes to two hours. Loveless manages a thriving body-piercing business that costs around $25 per piercing. Customers showed up early and often Wednesday for the piercing services with many appearing to be mother-and-daughter combos. Phoenix and Loveless seem to reflect a new trend in the industry away from the previous conceptions of dingy, dirty places in red light districts catering to motorcycle bums, sailors and ne'er-do-wells. Art Throb is bright, antiseptic with a family atmosphere accentuated by Better Business Bureau and Escondido Chamber of Commerce plaques on its brightly colored walls.

What's more, aside from husband-and-wife ownership, Sharon and Tony Humpal, also married, work as well at the parlor. Each was busy with needle and ink, too. And who were they tattooing with what? Why, each had a member of the mother-and-son tattoo patron team in the form of Paula Schilton and Jeremy Kovacevich. They hail from Vista, where Schilton is a Vista Unified School District employee and Kovacevich is a senior at Rancho Buena Vista High School. "This is mother-and-son bonding," Schilton said as Sharon Humpal penned the outlines of a pretty butterfly's wings on her ankle. "I have a sunshine on my shoulder and a rose on my hip," Schilton continued. "It's Jeremy's birthday but since he didn't get me a Christmas present he decided to give me a present today." Kovacevich sat to the side as Tony Humpal handled his artistic tattoo. In this case, Humpal painstakingly applied an angel-and-devil representation that Kovacevich said "is for my conscience." For Sharon Humpal, the business side of the tattoo game is "something I've always wanted to do," she said. "This is a job where I can draw all day. It's a lot of fun doing what you want to do and it's permanent." Which brings back to Phoenix's mind the Savage magazine treatment which can be viewed in its entirety at the Art Throb Web site, www.artthrob.com. Called "Eva Phoenix Rises to the Artistic Challenges and Shocks the Hell out of People," photos by Dano and written by Tom Gunn, the article features many of Phoenix's top art tattoos in addition to observations and information about the Escondido business. "We've been here for three years doing OK," Phoenix said. "I think the future of tattoos is in a lot more people who got interested and were getting scattered bits looking at the body as a total concept. We're doing some things that are artistic, flowing with the body." Contact staff writer Dan Weisman at (760) 739-6644 or dweisman@nctimes.com. 3/4/01