Butthole Tattoos and The Man Behind Them
Chicago tattoo artist Randy Candy will ink you anywhere you want...and give you a discount if you choose your backdoor.
By Riley Blake
Tattoo artist Randy Candy with his son Vlad. And no, he’s not really inking the kid. (Randy Candy)
Budding flowers, cannibalistic serpents, and an erect holy-figure being crucified.
What do these three things have to do with each other? They’re all tattoos created by a man named Randy Candy — and they’ve all located on people’s buttholes.
If the concept of butthole tattoos surprises you, it’s time to break the news: Yes, people pay to have permanent art forever inked onto that strange and mysterious hole we fart and poop from.
And Candy, who operates out of Chicago at the Pink Rhino Tattoo and Body Piercing, takes great pride in being the man who can make these artistic dreams happen.
“My first tattoo was pretty much a throbbing veiny weiner added to someone’s thigh,” the 40-year-old told OK Whatever. “That was followed by Bart Simpson jerking off into his own mouth and a Gremlin jerking off on Bart.”
In “Randy Candy Land” — the name of his website and online portfolio — you’ll find nothing but eye-popping insanity. With its colorful vulgarity, Candy’s art carries a hint of cartoonist R. Crumb’s cartoonish style, along with a dash of inspiration from the 1980s trading cards, Garbage Pail Kids.
From a spider of enormous proportions crawling across a man’s ass to a real penis that had its tip tattooed pink, if you ask for it, Randy Candy will more than likely oblige.
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His sexual and freaky tattoos aren’t for the faint of heart, and his personality reflects this, too. Heavily pierced and covered in tattoos, he’s quick to point out that he’s not a politically correct guy — something that he’s made work in conjunction with his art.
“I’m very unfiltered and non-P.C.,” he said. “Once a client knows that anything goes, they can be as comfortable as possible because nothing can be said that is uncomfortable in my atmosphere.”
An artist first and foremost, Candy has found success over the last five years inking just about anything — no matter how close to them this means he must be.
“[When tattooing,] I’m all up in their ass,” he said.
Given the vast number of buttholes he’s tattooed, the weirdness of these situations hardly registers for him and clients get accustomed to it pretty quickly, too, he said.
“If you’re on all fours getting your asshole colored, you’re going to be pretty comfortable with your surroundings for the most part, so it’s never been an issue.”
Although, it probably helps that he has a privacy curtain in place to block his clients from view while he works. And sometimes that can take up to 10 hours, especially for butthole tattoos, which generally always include both cheeks, too.
And yes, getting a tattoo on your shitter does hurt.
“The actual hole is delicate and more sensitive, for sure,” Candy explained.
But it’s not an entirely intolerable type of pain either.
“The human body is a strong machine.”
Candy is also the main piercing specialist at Pink Rhino Tattoo, having picked up the craft through an apprenticeship 10 years ago. Since then, he’s added studs and rings to pretty much every body part you can imagine, including the genitalia of both genders. He’s also permanently implanted gems onto people’s teeth.
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Not only does he revel in the strange, but Candy also offers a discount for it.
“The weirder it gets, the cheaper it becomes,” he said. “I’m always thinking of something more fucked-up to tattoo, or an area not so explored. It’s funny just to have fun with it.”
In other words, if you’re thinking of getting great grandma’s portrait tattooed on your forearm, you might as well save a few bucks and have her smiling over your asshole instead.
It appears almost as fate that Candy would end up permanently cementing large throbbing cocks onto the thighs of strangers.
In high school, Candy was nominated to design the cover of his school’s yearbook based off the skills he’d shown in art class. The artwork he ended up creating passed the muster of school officials, but little did they know that he’d meticulously hidden penises and vaginas — or, as Candy called them “peens and vageens” — right there on the front cover.
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Growing up in the ‘80s, Candy had a passion for collecting Garbage Pail Kids trading cards, which always featured unfortunate events falling upon the grotesque Cabbage Patch-esque cartoons.
The names of two of its characters — Rancid Randy and Handy Randy — inspired Candy to adopt the nickname “Randy Candy” for himself. After going by that name for decades, he legally changed it in 2015, bidding adieu to his birth moniker, Randall John Esche. He also adopted a new middle-name, “Pizza,” because that’s what he ate daily for lunch. His name change saga was big enough news that even the Chicago Tribune published a story on it.
In an industry that attracts all walks of life, I asked Candy to fill me in on who might be hiding a masturbating Bart Simpson beneath their clothes.
“You'd be surprised,” he said. ”Some of the most normal looking humans are the ones that get some of the most ridiculous tattoos or private piercings. I feel like it’s what makes them feel alive.”
As for Candy, it’s clear that what makes him feel more alive is charting taboo territory. And, now that he’s conquered the art of tattooing buttholes, he’s ready for another challenge to take on. Taints, he thinks, might be next.
RILEY BLAKE IS AN OREGON-BASED WRITER. IF HE'S NOT WRITING, HE CAN BE FOUND PAINTING WITH ABSURD AMOUNTS OF COLOR, SNOWBOARDING, COOKING STRANGE MEATS, OR LOVING ON HIS ADORABLE CAT.
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