Right, well I can't get that crap film to load this time around but I think I heard the number "7 hours" in there are well. In the deseretnews article they also write: "In his 24 years, he's turned away a lot of customers who want to get tattoos that can't be covered up with clothing. He and his staff spent nearly seven hours Wednesday trying to talk Smith out of it."
Right. Kay. So every article carries the same number of hours and other details.. Starts looking like a regurgitated press release to me.
It make no sense that a tat-artist would spend an entire working day wasting away money he could have made just inking a couple of dolphins on ankles trying to talk a customer out of a tattoo. The tattoo-artists that I know personally all have their own mind made up and a customer will never change it - not that they represent all inkers of the world. Either they do hands and face or they don't. They don't even discuss it, if they don't (which is by far the most common), they send you on your merry way. They might give you the name of someone who does face and hands. It's not up to the customer to nag their way to it, tat-artists make up their own minds. So I find that part of the stort strange as hell.

And like you I wish the quirky news areas of papers and TV would stop bending over backwards to become free advertising time for a poorly executed stunt in very bad taste. To top it all off, an unoriginal stunt too. Ebay must love it though as they get their name on TV for free all the time thanks to these stunts.