At one tattoo shop in West Houston, the sign spells it out: Under Texas law,  no one under 18 can legally get a tattoo here.

So how is it so many teens have them?

“At least three-fourths my friends do,” 16-year-old Shara Fletcher said. “I personally like them.”

Sherry Fletcher is her mom.

“Finally she admitted she had a tattoo, and I saw it and I said, ‘you know, don’t lie to me,’” her mom said.

Her tattoo, a rose, is on her back, and she didn’t want to show it on-camera.

She got it without telling her mother and now she is incensed at whoever did it.

AP

“I mainly don’t like the fact that these men touched her,” her mother said. “That irks me more than anything.”

Her daughter said she got at Tan the Man tattoos but said she used a fake ID.

“We can pretty much tell if it’s fake or legit,” Ryan Hull with Tan the Man tattoos said.

The guys that run the place deny she got the tattoo here.

“We keep a record of everybody that comes through here,” Mike B. said. “With a valid ID, we take a photo copy of the ID; she wasn’t in here.”

They suspect she got it from another shop or someone working out of a home.

How many Houston kids are out there getting tattoos illegally without their parents even knowing about it? And if so, what’s the harm? One doctor has some answers.

“And about 80 percent of them said they did have it done professionally,” said pediatrician at UH-Houston Dr. Laura Benjamins.

Dr. Benjamins surveyed 1,000 Houston-area high school students and found about 9 percent of them had at least one tattoo. Fifty percent of them did not tell their parents before they got it, and the majority said they got the work done by professionals.

“My concern would be it may be very difficult for a teenager to really understand not only the medical risks of getting a tattoo, but what it might mean to them in the future in terms of future employment,” Dr. Benjamins said.

That’s why the doctor said parents should talk to their kids about tattoos because her survey also found 35 percent of high school students without them are thinking about getting one.

Not that she thinks tattoos are bad; she herself got one years ago.

But here’s the thing: At this shop, they said some parents not only know their kids want tattoos, the parents try to help their kids get them.

“We still have a lot of parents coming in here with their children saying ‘I’m their parent, I can sign for them,’” Texas Tattoo Emporium manager Ben Lambert said. “’No, you can’t sign for them,’” Lambert said. “It’s illegal in Texas.”

But it’s a misdemeanor, and Fletcher said she had no luck getting the District Attorneys office interested in pursing it.

“I want it to stop, and I want that thing off her back,” she said.

“I respect what she wants to say but I do still like them,” her daughter said.

A mother-daughter disagreement over something that by law should never have happened.