Reuters reports today that a 29 year old Iraqi by the name of Sarmad Shamael has opened what is Iraq’s only tattoo parlor in a basement studio in downtown Baghdad. Traditional designs like skulls, dragons and pinup girls are apparently the most popular of the 100 or so designs the young artist has laid down so far.

To complement all the do-gooding going on in various rebuilding and re-culturization projects in Iraq nowadays, most of which are spearheaded by Americans, I think someone wicked like Paul Booth ought to head over to the fertile crescent and lay some world-class ink down on Iraqi metalheads pro-bono. Thoughts?