Tattoo parlor owner speaks out about viral comments
Raul Tanguma, the owner of Sailor's World Famous Tattoos and Piercings, denies some of the comments that posts on social media claim he made, but not all of them.
"My comment was 'if you cut any deeper, we wouldn't be doing this,'" said Tanguma. "Meaning if you cut deeper, you're going to die."
Eyewitness News originally spoke to one of three women who visited the tattoo parlor over the weekend Monday. You can read that story
.
"They left, made a Facebook comment, I replied, and that pretty much snowballed from there," said Tanguma.
He says the first woman approached him wanting a tattoo to cover her self-inflicted scars. That's when Tanguma says he made the first comment.
"The first girl that got tattooed didn't get offended," he said.
A short time after, one of the other women approached him about her self-inflicted scars.
"I made the comment 'oh, you guys don't have guns or what? What is the problem?' And that was the extent of the entire conversation," said Tanguma.
He says he knew the second woman was offended because she rolled her eyes and walked away.
"She got upset about what I said about the guns and walked off," said Tanguma.
Tanguma says the three stayed in the shop while another artist in the parlor tattooed the first woman. Tanguma has a short video of the tattoo on his company's now disabled Facebook page.
"At the end of it, I was like 'I didn't really mean any of that stuff.' At the end of this thing, I said 'I didn't mean it, but I'm glad the way you took it,'" he said.
According to Tanguma, it was the third woman who posted a bad Facebook review.
"They tried to lure me into 'oh well you're bullying me,' well you came to my page so I'm not really bullying you," he said during an interview Tuesday.
He says the comments that went viral from the post do not tell the entire story, but he doesn't deny any of the comments posted under the Sailor's World Famous Tattoos and Piercings' Facebook page.
"I have freedom of speech. I should be able to say whatever I want. If a person gets offended by that, I can't help that," said Tanguma.
The owner says he has been receiving threatening messages through other social media accounts since the posts went viral.
"If they think they're right by threatening me, threatening my life, my business, and my family because I said something that offended a sad girl and made her sadder? Sorry, man. I don't have any sympathy for that."
