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Fela Sekou, 36, of Northeast Washington, got a tattoo portrait of his father, Lawrence Turner, who died of lung cancer. "His death was a very tragic and emotional time," Sekou says. "Getting a tattoo soothed the pain. It brought the love back. It was like a closure for me.

"I was a walking zombie for six months. I gave myself a year to mourn. It was like a rite of passage."

There's been an evolution in tattoo artistry. Now we find former fine artists sketching the lines of a portrait on a canvas of skin.

"In the last 3 1/2 years, you see a whole lot more portraits," Zulu says. "The point is you have to know how to draw. . . . If you want to have a picture of your mother tattooed on you, and someone walks up and says, 'That's a great picture of a Doberman pinscher,' it isn't good."

Tattoo portraits provide lucrative work for previously struggling artists. Locally, a portrait tattoo could run you from $85 to $200. "Cheap tattoos are cheap," a sign in Liquidity Jones says.

Zulu, who has tattooed Hollywood celebrities including Janet Jackson, Christina Aguilera and Queen Latifah, demands a rate of $250 an hour, but his minimum fee is $1,000.

Skin is a unique canvas that allows no room for mistakes. "On canvas if the nose is crooked, you can repaint it," says Zulu, who studied fine art. "You don't have that option on the skin. . . . You need to study the Old Masters' work if you are going to do portraits. Nobody wants a portrait that looks like Picasso's work. They don't want three eyes and two mouths. They want da Vinci, Michelangelo."

Many portrait tattoo artists blend into their sessions philosophy and psychology and messages about life and death -- preaching to young people as the rotary machine whizzes, preaching that one must elevate oneself despite the code of the street.

Charles "Coco" Bayron, owner of Nu Flava Ink in Southeast Washington, says he tries to teach his clients that what they ink on their bodies should be meaningful. "Some people want 'Thug Life' on their stomach," Bayron says. "I don't do whatever on somebody if it is not art. A thug is not going to promote that he is a thug."

He refuses to do gang tattoos as well. "If somebody comes in and says, 'I want Young Gunner on me,' they say that's what I represent. I say, 'I don't do anything to empower a gang.' "

Also on the forbidden lists are memorial portraits of known neighborhood drug dealers. If a client brings in a photo of a younger person, "I ask them who is it. It has to be a relative. It can't be nobody like a homeboy from the neighborhood. I say no. You don't make those boys martyrs."

He says they need to learn about real martyrs: "A lot of kids I talk to around here don't even know who Martin Luther King is or Malcolm X. They really don't know."