BLUE ISLAND, Ill. -- Patrick Miller's left arm is freshly inked with a naughty leprechaun dropping his pants, a naughtier one shooting a Tommy gun and the words "Luck of the Irish" looped around a shamrock.

Some luck.

Days after Miller and two buddies visited a Blue Island tattoo parlor, staph boils erupted from their skin.

Though Miller said he was doped on Vicodin during an interview with the Daily Southtown, the 21-year-old started crying from the pain as he tried to pull back a pad on his arm to reveal the damage.

"I just paid for a disease," Miller said.

The three friends say they paid about $750 in cash to Lil Smitty's Tattoo Magic, 2357 Vermont St. According to the Southtown's report, the bills for their drugs and hospital and doctors' visits will be much more.

Staph bacteria live on everyone's skin and often cause infections. Aggressive and drug-resistant strains, though, are sending more and more perplexed victims running to emergency rooms lately.

The three young men, who live in Chicago's Mount Greenwood community, blame their suffering on the tattoo artist.

Phillip Boyd, 18, has developed red marks on his arm around his little yellow ducky.

Charles Durkin's new art, like Miller's, is more extensive, and so are his wounds. On his right arm, he got two winged bullets, the aces of hearts and spades, flaming snake-eyed dice with "Chi-town" and a collage of four aces, a stack of poker chips and a hand holding a stack of hundreds.

Durkin, 21, has gotten tattoos before, including one about six months ago from Lil Smitty's. Now he's angry that he took his friends there and referred others.

"My whole arm is disgusting," he said.

Last week his and Miller's boils were surgically cut and drained -- yielding an amount of fluid they described as several shot glasses full. Then the holes were stuffed full of gauze to make sure the deep wounds would heal from the bottom up and not become reinfected.

Boyd took photos of the bloody procedure with Durkin's phone.

The Daily Southtown visited Lil Smitty's on Thursday to request an interview or comment and was referred to the owner, Smitty, who wasn't there. Smitty did not return a message left with his son, the artist who tattooed Durkin.

Durkin said he tried to report the public health risk to the proper authorities. But there is no authority until a new law takes effect July 1.

Tattoo artists and piercers aren't licensed by the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation as acupuncturists, barbers, nail technicians and workers in a couple of dozen other job categories that involve touching people are.

Beginning this summer, they will have to be certified by the Illinois Department of Public Health and submit to inspections. The agency still is working out the rules.

"Right now, you go and you get a tattoo at your own risk," spokeswoman Melaney Arnold said.

Blue Island administrator Mike Anastasia said the city hasn't received any complaints about Lil Smitty's, the only tattoo shop in town. The village has no authority to inspect or cite the business anyway, Anastasia said.

Staph Getting Hardier

Most minor skin infections involve staph, said Dr. John Andreoni, an infectious disease specialist at Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn.

"You think of pimples -- some of that is staph," Andreoni said.

But more virulent forms of it seem to be blossoming in the community, he said.

"Looking at emergency room visits of people with skin infections over the past six months, the majority are this MRSA," Andreoni said. MRSA stands for methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus, meaning the usual antibiotics are useless against it.

Durkin went to a specialist Wednesday and learned that MRSA is what ravaged his arm.

Outside of hospitals and nursing homes, the infections have been most common among youths involved in contact sports and people likely to get cuts and scrapes, such as carpenters and mechanics.

"Any time you pierce your ears, get a water blister from a tight shoe, those are entry points for this bacteria to get in and cause an infection," Andreoni said.

Durkin said he thought the first mark on his skin several days after his visit to Lil Smitty's was an ingrown hair.

"I didn't think anything of it," he said. "You're supposed to trust these guys. They're sticking a needle into your body."

Getting tattoos gives staph three opportunities to get inside, Andreoni said.

Keeping it out demands cleansing it from the skin, using sterile equipment to inject the ink and keeping the area clean while the skin heals.

The fact that all three of the men developed infections "points toward the process as a cause," Andreoni said, though he was speaking without direct knowledge of their cases.

Steven Bennett, a piercer at Basement Ink in Oak Forest who is certified by the National Safety Council to teach blood-borne pathogen courses, said it's unlikely to get staph from a tattoo artist who scrupulously follows sterilization protocols. But it's not unusual to find artists who don't, he said.

"There isn't a lot of education out there," Bennett said. "I've watched people doing tattoos while eating, answering the phone with their gloves on -- these things can't happen."

He suggests customers look for certificates from sterilization courses or membership in the Association of Professional Tattooists, which requires annual training.

And if the art or piercings at the place are too cheap, Bennett said, "you're getting more than you ask for."

Durkin, Miller and Boyd won't be in the market again soon. Miller said his soon-to-be-scarred leprechauns are his last tattoos.

"It ain't worth the pain," he said.

Copyright 2007, Sun-Times News Group