A RIOT of colour, blood and buzzing took over Bournemouth BIC at the weekend.

The second Bournemouth Ink tattoo convention attracted around 3-4,000 people.

They paid £20 a day to see burlesque dancers, live music, and 106 tattoo stands.

The Purbeck Hall sounded like a dozen dentists were all working at once.

Ben Lengdon, 22, an engineer from Southbourne, had a back smeared with red blood and red ink.

He was getting a huge tattoo of Japanese demon mask that would take 15-20 hours and cost hundreds of pounds.

He said: “I quite like the reaction you get. You get few a few negatives but you can’t please everyone.”

The convention was quite a spectacle.

A Goth stalked the tables on stilts armed with a whip crying hoarsely: “So much beauty and so much pain!”

Skulls and roses were the favoured designs on the handbag and dress stalls.

Everyone managed to appear nonchalant about the pain.

Joe Munroe, 22, from Parkstone, a tattooist with Divine Canvass, had intricate patterns over the sides of his face.

“People do up their house, of buy Calvin Klein clothes - they can grasp that,” he said.

“But to some of them the skin is different. I don’t see the problem with decorating it.”

Tattooist Ben Hamill, 29, from Ink Parkstone, designed the event logo.

“It’s popular you make yourself different from the crowd,” he said, as he worked on an arm length tattoo for dancer Cheyenne Nye, 19, from Bournemouth town centre.