SANTA CRUZ — Usually, when Hudge does a piece of art, he does what somebody else wants. he gets one shot and he has almost no margin for error.

That’s because, as a tattoo artist and owner of F-U Tattoo in Santa Cruz, most of his art stays permanently on someone’s skin.

The tiny stars on a woman’s bikini line, he said, are the most stressful.

“It’s got to be perfect,” he said, “or it’s wrong.”

Hudge, 40, and the other tattoo artists at his shop, however, want the world to know that they do art outside the shop, too, and off the human body. so all this month they will be displaying their paintings — acrylics on board, gouache on paper and more — in Meeting of the Minds, a show at the Felix Kulpa Gallery and Sculpture Garden downtown.

The shop’s other featured artists are Amanda Payne, Nick Vargas, Derek Pratt and Ron Hendrix.

My paintings are about as far away from tattooing as I can get,” Hudge said, “but obviously they’re still influenced by tattoo imagery.”

And though much of the art on display is also inspired by the folk art that inspires some tattoo art, the F-U Tattoo artists’ works are still a break away from the hard lines they buzz into skin at the shop.

Vargas, for instance, has a series of six paintings inspired by his children or children’s stories. a couple of his paintings are gouache on paper and feature the Gingerbread Man or Humpty Dumpty riding a beetle.

“Tattooing is a job,” the 15-year tattoo artist Vargas said. “Most of the time it doesn’t feel like a job, but still it’s a job. This is not.”

Though the 34-year-old Vargas said he and other tattoo artists sometimes get to tattoo what they want on clients, most of the time they’re inking other people’s ideas.

“Whereas painting we can do our own ideas,” he said. “It’s forgiving, too. you can mess up painting, but you can’t mess up tattooing somebody.”

Pratt, the shop manager, paints science fiction and fantasy illustration. though he is still learning tattooing, he said the discipline’s line-oriented style has influenced his work in the two years he’s been with F-U Tattoo.

“I’m definitely not as loose with my art as I was before working in the tattoo shop,” he said, “and that’s neither good nor bad.”

Hudge’s paintings are perhaps the closest to resembling tattoo art. They are acrylics on board and feature brightly colored dragons and other fantastical creatures.

But the strong influence is understandable.

Hudge has done tattoos for more than 20 years. the Santa Cruz native started after moving to Hawaii right out of high school.

At the time he didn’t know a person could even make a living doing tattoos, but a friend and fellow surfer who eventually landed in prison told him to go back to California, get away from the trouble that surrounded him on the islands and learn the trade.

Hudge came back and told his parents his plans. both were artists, “so they didn’t freak out when I was like, I want to be an artist for a living,’” he said.

After doing tattoos in different parts of the country and world and working for years at shops around town, Hudge opened F-U Tattoo eight years ago with fellow artist Miki.

F-U Tattoo caters to locals, Hudge said, and steers away from creating a mass-appeal image or vibe just to bring in more money.

“The best way to explain it is we get Yelp reviews all the time and most of them are great,” he said. “But the ones that are bad, 99 percent of them never even made it through the door. They get pissed off before the tattoo even starts.”

As for which is more rewarding: the tattooing or the painting?

“I haven’t really sold any big, expensive, heavy watershed paintings yet,” Hudge said. “So maybe you need to ask me again when I sell a $2,500 painting.”

Tattoo artists display their outside-the-shop work at Santa Cruz gallery