Georgia Couple Busted for Tattooing Own Kids

Patty Jo Marsh, Jacob Bartels make bail, get children back
By Marie Morris,  Newser Staff
Posted Jan 3, 2010 3:14 PM CST
Georgia Couple Busted for Tattooing Own Kids
This tattoo, on leg of a model in Melbourne, Australia, is more like it--six the Marsh-Bartels kids of Georgia now have small black crosses on their hands.   (Getty Images)

A Georgia couple is out on bond after being charged with illegally tattooing six of their children because the kids wanted to be more like them. "If I’m such a bad parent, then how come they brought the kids back right after I got out jail?" asked Patty Jo Marsh, arrested last week with Jacob Bartels for using a makeshift machine to tattoo small crosses on the hands of the six oldest kids —aged 10, 11, 11, 12, 15, and 17—in their blended family. Georgia law prohibits both tattoos by unlicensed artists and tattoos on people under 18.

"We would never do anything to hurt them," Marsh, who said she didn't know what they were doing was illegal, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
(More tattoos stories.)

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