Actually, it's also a good way to get yourself arrested.

Over the course of five hours, my girlfriend shot a roll of snapshots as a tattoo gun penetrated my flesh thousands of times while I lay there screaming. A couple of days later we had some shopping to do, so we went to Target and brought the film along to their one hour photo center. When we returned to the counter to retrieve the prints, the woman gasped audibly.

"Oh my god," she hissed. "You shouldn't have brought those here!"

She went on to explain that technically, somebody should be getting in big trouble. It seems that to get a tattoo on my back, I removed my shirt. To put it more simply, these were topless pictures. I hadn't remembered that, and neither had my girlfriend. We were more absorbed in the excitement - and I in the unbelievable pain - so when we brought the pictures in we forgot they should have been Polaroids. The employee said she should have reported the nudity, which would have gotten us in trouble, and if she had been caught letting it get by she would have lost her job.

There have also been cases in which parents have had their children removed by Child Protection Services as a result of photo shop employees reporting partial nudity in summer vacation or bathtime pictures. This is probably even more frequent than photographs involving adults, because a person making $5.75/hour is charged with deciding what is child pornography and what is just a smiling baby splashing in a bathtub. Such incidents almost always involve an arrest, because the authorities will assume the worst first and ask questions later. I remember seeing a program on TV in which a father told his story - he hasn't seen his two daughters in years because one of them mooned the camera while they were on vacation at the beach. (James Kincaid wrote an article - http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2000/01/31/kincaid/ - for Salon.com about this subject.)

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