How to submit stuff to The Tattoo

First off, don't send us anything until you've introduced yourself in an email. Tell us about yourself first and then pitch your ideas. We're eager to hear them, but it helps us to know something about you before we consider whether a particular story idea is a good fit.
For instance, say that "Becky" is 13 and just getting started with The Tattoo. If she proposed writing a story about "the way lots of teens are taking crystal meth and it's messing up their lives" we would think "well, she's ambitious, which is great, but that's too much to tackle for a newcomer."
But if "Becky" said she wanted to write about how all the girls in her school are wearing rubber bracelets with odd little sayings on them, we'd likely give her the green light to take it on.
In short, prove yourself first, then aim high.
Now for the information that will help us deal with all of the material that flows in here at Tattoo Central.
When you write something, you should:
Clearly state in the subject line of an email what you are submitting.
Paste the entire text of anything into the email itself (after any personal note you may need to explain what it is).
If you can, also attach the story in Word format or as a TEXT file. If you write it with WordPerfect or other word processing programs, save your story in text format (for Windows if possible) and send it to us as an attachment that way.
Don't write something like "REPLY NOW" on the subject line. That's just irritating. But if you don't hear anything from us within a couple days, a gentle email asking if we got it is fine. If you don't hear anything still, send a less delicate email. If you still don't hear, then you can write "What the heck is going on there at Tattoo Central?"
The answer is, almost always, that it's insanely busy here and we haven't had a chance to give whatever you sent a proper read yet.
If you are submitting photographs (hurrah!) or cartoons (bravo!), send them as TIF or JPG files in as large a size as you can. On the web site, we can use cell phone-type pictures but for our printed pages, we need reasonably detailed pictures or they won't work in the newspaper. Photos should generally be at least 150 MB but larger files are better. If you're scanning artwork or photos, do it at a very high resolution.