Canadian resident Art Commisso designed a South Park-inspired Kanye West tattoo this week and actually had the image permanently inked on his body, all for the sake of a couple of free tickets to Yeezy’s concert at the First Ontario Centre in Hamilton. It all started when Oliver Knutton of O’s Clothes bought a couple of Kanye tickets for himself and then bought a couple more to give away at his clothing store in Canada. But he didn’t just want to give them away, he wanted Kanye fans to work for it. So he decided to make it a competition, with the Yeezy tickets going to the fan who designed the most original Kanye West tattoo or Kanye-inspired artwork. The winner was the lucky Art Commisso, who went under the needle at Mata Mata Studios to get a pretty weird Yeezy tattoo inspired by an obscure joke in a South Park episode that aired in 2009. The kicker? He’s not even a big fan of Kanye West.
Commisso, who already has 20 to 30 tattoos scattered across his body, jumped at the opportunity to score a free tattoo and win free concert tickets, even though he doesn’t especially like Kanye West’s music. The 27-year-old beat out nine other contest participants with his Kanye-inspired artwork, which he says took him “about five seconds” to come up with, and the result is a pretty strange tattoo of Kanye kissing a fish over a banner than reads “Fish Sticks” on his right calf. Don’t get the reference? You’d have to have caught the South Park episode featuring Kanye West to understand the joke, which has to do with the rapper being the only person in the country who fails to get a crude “fish sticks” joke, but can’t admit that he doesn’t get it because he considers himself a genius. This, of course, refers to Kanye’s enormous ego.
“When I saw there was the contest, it brought me back to the episode with Kanye West…it’s kind of a play on his rhymes and his word play,” explained Commisso. And his clever South Park artwork paid off. “This was pretty unanimous,” Knutton said about choosing Commisso as the winner. “It was the most tattoo-ready, it was funny, it was light-hearted.” Rick Daignault, the tattoo artist responsible for actually inking the Kanye tattoo, agreed, saying, “It was pretty logical, as logical as getting a Kanye tattoo to get free tickets to a Kanye show is.” Kanye West himself could have gotten involved in the competition, but he didn’t respond to the contest organizers’ attempts to contact him via Twitter. His loss, if you ask us. Although, when that particular South Park episode originally aired, Kanye wrote in a blog that it hurt his feelings, so maybe he didn’t want to relive that pain all over again…
