Sometimes flipping the bird isn’t enough.
A Colorado tattoo parlor has had its fill of customers’ cars being towed away by a neighboring apartment building — so they covered their roof with a giant mural of male genitalia.
David Brown, 54, and his co-workers at Fallen Heroes Tattoo in Colorado Springs took to their roof in early October with paintbrushes after months of trying to deal with the owners of 532CO, who he says have towed dozens of cars while refusing to put in clear signage for its private parking spots.
“All they ever tell us is ‘That’s our property. Suck it.’ And I’m like, ‘Okay, I don’t know what else to do,’” Brown told The Post. “Because they’re not breaking any rules. It’s just, why be a d–k?”
So their ensuing mural embodied just that.
At the center of the dispute is an alleyway separating the two buildings, which is lined with private parking spots for apartment residents — but the spots abut the parlor, while the parking signage is across the alley on the apartment building wall.
“So for anybody driving in there it looks like, ‘Oh, cool, I can park super close to the shop.’ The signs are all the way across the alley, mounted on their building,” Brown said.
He estimates the misleading signage has led directly to at least 40 customers’ cars being towed in just the last three months, and even more since the apartment building opened earlier this year (blocking the parlor’s stunning mountain views when it did, Brown noted).
All it would take to fix the problem, Brown believes, is a simple “Resident Parking” stencil spray-painted onto the spots — but months of efforts, he says, trying to reach management have gone nowhere.
“Management. You can’t talk to anybody. They put you on a voicemail, and you don’t ever get to talk to anybody,” he said.
Feeling there was nowhere left to turn, Brown and his employees at the tattoo parlor hatched a plan.
“We started talking about it and thought. ‘Maybe the whole neighborhood loves this apartment building that looks like Ikea threw up.’ We thought, ‘Maybe we’re the d–ks!’ So we asked ourselves what everybody liked doing on the mountains that we used to be able to see,” he joked.
“So you got d–ks up there skateboarding, d–ks up there snowboarding, a couple skiing. Doing all the things us d–ks used to love to do when we could see our mountain.”
The mural has yet to elicit any reactions from the apartment’s management company — but numerous residents have expressed their distaste.
“Apartment residents are not fans. We spoke to one, and she said that she thinks that’s disgusting,” Brown said, noting they’ve gotten at least one review online calling them “lawless animals.”
“We’re actually making T-shirts about that one,” he added.
Brown doesn’t want to have to keep the mural up for long, and hopes the apartment management company will respond by simply adding new parking signage.
“I won’t leave that up there a day longer than I need to,” Brown said. “I don’t need to make my d–ks a monument.”
The building’s management did not respond to The Post’s requests for comment.
