The "corporate" thing is a red herring, it isn't a massive business at all, it's a small franchise operation. Until recently it was owned by a dentist, who bought it for $50k. KFC it isn't. Then recently a mate of mine bought it (not with his own money!), but he wouldn't tell me how much for, the spoilsport.
However the real downside to a tattoo is that the majority of people that do ironman races are knobheads. More than 50% of them, anyway. Look round any ironman expo and you'll see that I'm right! Of course this could be skewed by the fact that the knobheads can't resist spending 10 hours a day strutting round ironman expos comparing bikini lines, so the non-knobheads are less apparent.
Of course people who haven't done an ironman don't realise this, so the tattoo still works.
But beware; I was "hill training" on a treadmill the other week and my tattoo attracted a knobhead who also had one. He was the third biggest knobhead I've ever had to escape from. The biggest knobhead was some knobhead from Bath who was staying at the same hotel as me in Arizona in 2006, who actually got jealous and ran over when the second biggest knobhead (a British "pro") asked me how to work the waffle machine at breakfast.
So, in summary: knobheads
