A Brooklyn man has had a devil of a time since a NYC tattoo shop to the stars botched the angel it was supposed to ink on his back, he claims in a lawsuit.
Samvel Sarhsian went to Inked NYC in Chelsea — where Post Malone, 50 Cent and Nick Cannon have all gotten stamped — in October for a full back tattoo depicting warriors with angel wings in a battle scene.
“You can’t even imagine how I dreamed about this tattoo for a very long time,” he told The Post.
“I was looking for a salon that would do it for me.”
He chose the shop “because I heard that it is the top tattoo place in the world,” said Sarhsian, whose native language is Armenian and spoke through text messages and a translator.
Sarhsian, 30, who works in the cryptocurrency industry in New York and Europe, said he had a tattoo on his arm and wanted to continue the same style of design onto his back, finding an image online.
InkedNYC and Brazilian tattoo artist Gian Villena assured him they could replicate the work.
Complicating matters, Sarhsian said neither he nor Villena — who speaks Portuguese and has nearly 54,000 Instagram followers — spoke enough English to fully communicate about the job, for which he plunked down a $500 deposit, according to court papers.
A manager had to “facilitate” their interaction, Sarhsian claimed, and when he objected to the initial results, employees urged him to “trust the process.”
After three sessions, for which he shelled out $7,500, the tattoo was a blurry, off-center, half-finished mess, he said in a Manhattan Supreme Court lawsuit.
“It looked horrible,” he said, adding, “I’m very disappointed, upset about my experience.”
He’s been so traumatized, Sarhsian is afraid to get any more tattoos, he said.
Villena’s “errors” included “overlooking the natural curvature of [Sarhsian’s] spine” and “significant blurring,” Sarhsian contended in the Manhattan Supreme Court filing against the artist and the West 22nd Street studio.
“Instead of meticulously hand-drawing the high-quality image, Villena used automatic lines through digital means, likely with a standard iPad program like Procreate,” Sarhsian said in court papers.
“Villena deviated from the agreed-upon proportions, failed to achieve smooth, realistic transitions, and his work lacked the necessary contrast to highlight the image’s form,” he added in the legal filing.
Sarhsian, who said an expert told him the tattoo was not able to be fixed, seeks unspecified damages.
“As soon as I saw it for the first time, I was shocked . . . I realized it was wrong,” he said.
“I didn’t want to continue because I thought it would be even worse.”
Headaches, anxiety and sleep problems have plagued Sarhsian ever since, and removing the faulty work won’t be easy since “his back is covered with small moles, making the procedure more complicated and potentially dangerous.”
InkedNYC owner Donald Hellinger said Sarhsian “has very little if any knowledge or experience getting large scale tattoo,” and blamed the client for not seeing the process through to completion.
“The client didn’t even sit through 2 [sic] sessions of the 5-6 sessions required to complete the tattoo,” he told The Post.
“The process of getting a tattoo is similar to building a house, the blue print is created and then the frame of the house is built. If the client refuses offers to complete the project they are left with just a bunch of sticks, that bunch of sticks doesn’t look like their dream home but it would if they allowed the contractors to complete the construction process.”
