Broadcasting a provocative message on one’s roof may be the ultimate troll move; at least, that’s the conclusion drawn by residents of the apartment building adjacent to a Colorado tattoo parlor — after the owner ‘expressed’ his feelings about a parking dispute.
The story involves the owner of Fallen Heroes Tattoo in Colorado Springs, Colo., who finally reached his breaking point over his customers’ cars being towed because of complaints from the owners of an adjacent apartment building.
And what, exactly, did he want to express? His covering of the roof with a giant mural of male genitalia may be a clue.
“A new apartment complex just opened up next door to the shop,” the tattoo parlor’s owner, David Brown, narrates in a video posted to Instagram earlier this month. “They’ve been towing all of our customers’ vehicles along with other customers from nearby businesses; we tried to play fair, but now we’ll fight back with a d**k mural.”
At the beginning of October, Brown, 54, posted a video on his Instagram feed showing him painting obscene imagery on the roof of his shop. Since then, the story has made the rounds through local, national, and international media, including London’s The Guardian and the New York Post.
The brouhaha between Brown and the building’s owners, known as 532CO, has been months in the making. At the center of the dispute is an alleyway separating the two buildings lined with private parking spots for apartment residents; the spots abut the parlor shop’s wall, but signage is across the alley on the apartment building wall.
“All they ever tell us is ‘That’s our property. Suck it,’ Brown told the Post. “And I’m like, ‘Okay, I don’t know what else to do.’ …They’re not breaking any rules; it’s just, why be a d**k?”
He estimates that misleading signage has resulted in between 30 and 40 customers' cars being towed in just the last three months. Adding insult to injury, Brown said the new construction building also obstructed the shop’s once-picturesque views of the Rockies.
“So, for anybody driving in there, it looks like, ‘Oh, cool, I can park super close to the shop.’ The signs are all the way across the alley, mounted on their building,” Brown said.
Brown believes all it would take to fix the problem is a simple “Resident Parking” stencil spray-painted onto the spots, but months of efforts to reach management have gone nowhere.
“Management. You can’t talk to anybody. They put you on a voicemail, and you don’t ever get to talk to anybody,” he said. Frustrated, Brown and his tattoo parlor employees hatched a plan.
“We started talking about it and thought. ‘Maybe the whole neighborhood loves this apartment building that looks like Ikea threw up.’ We thought, ‘Maybe we’re the d**ks!’,” he joked.
While the mural has not elicited reactions from the apartment’s management company, residents have expressed their distaste.
“Apartment residents are not fans; we spoke to one, and she said that she thinks that’s disgusting,” Brown said, adding that at least one review online called the parlor’s staff “lawless animals.”
Brown added that he hoped not to keep the mural up for long and wished the apartment management company would resolve the issue by simply adding new parking signage.
“I won’t leave that up there a day longer than I need to,” Brown said. “I don’t need to make my d**k a monument.”
