Tat-Oops: New York Mets Fan Celebrates Title Early, Permanently

BY JASON KOESTENBLATT

There’s sports fandom, and then there’s Josh Davis.

The 22-year-old New Jersey man loves tattoos just as much as he adores his favorite baseball team, the New York Mets.

“Growing up I watched the Mets with my dad and it just kind of grew from there,” Davis said. “And then the ’98, ’99, 2000 teams and the World Series … I was a little kid and that was just everything to me.”

So when the Mets made an amazing run in 2015, winning the National League East Division for the first time in nine years, followed by a divisional round playoff series win against the Los Angeles Dodgers and subsequent four-game sweep of the Chicago Cubs in the National League Championship Series, Davis was brimming with confidence about his beloved squad.

Maybe a little too confident.

“I knew at some point I was going to get a (Mets) tattoo,” Davis said, speaking from First Place Tattoos on Main Street in Hackettstown, N.J. “So I was going in to see my artist on the day of game one of the World Series and I said ‘I’ve got the faith, let’s do this.’”

Davis told his tattoo artist, Don Kincaid – the man responsible for the colorful images on the super fan’s arms – he wanted the New York Mets logo tattooed on the side of his torso, but with one twist: It needed to say “World Champs 2015.”

“Don was like, ‘are you sure about this?’” Davis said. “I told him what the team meant to me and Don could see how much faith I had, so we went with it.”

Kincaid finished his work as the first inning of game one got underway.

Before he went under the needle, Davis tweeted, “Bout to make a bit of a risky move with my New York Mets,” and two hours later posted “Watching the first pitch while getting a met tattoo.” Those tweets didn’t convey the specifics of the artwork, though, until Davis posted a photo of the completed tattoo.

So what makes the tattoo problematic?

Davis’s premonition didn’t exactly come to fruition. The Mets lost the series to the Kansas City Royals four games to one.

While there’s no 2015 World Series trophy at Citi Field in Queens, the artwork on Davis’s body will remain – forever.

“I’m going to make it into a tribute piece,” Davis said, acknowledging the gaffe but passing it off as no big deal. “I think I’ll add the years of when they actually did win the World Series and maybe put an asterisk next to (2015).”

Photo Courtesy Josh Davis