Casa Sanchez restaurant offers customers free tacos for life if they get a tattoo of their logo http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/business&id=7363877 San Francisco: The Mission http://www.sfgate.com/neighborhoods/sf/mission/ Founding of the Mission Dolores http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist5/misdolor.html The Cambridge World History of Food: Mexico and Highland Central America http://www.cambridge.org/us/books/kiple/mexico.htm Tattoos: The Ancient and Mysterious History http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/tattoo.html Through the ages, tattoos have been symbols of many things, including membership in certain organizations (nautical or otherwise), but it's pretty safe to say that they haven't meant "free tacos" before the Casa Sanchez restaurant came along. Recently, the San Francisco restaurant decided to revive a tradition they started in 1999 as a type of "stimulus special", as family member and manager Martha Sanchez calls it. The deal is pretty simple: customers must agree get a small tattoo of the Casa Sanchez logo, which happens to be a little boy with a sombrero riding a giant ear of corn. For this display of permanent gustatory loyalty, the customer is entitled to one free meal a day for life, along with a drink of their choice. Ms. Sanchez attributes the success of the program to San Francisco's notably quirky denizens, and they still have a number of the original customers from 1999 who show up to partake of their "tattoo-for-tacos" pact. The first link leads to a recent Wall Street Journal article on the Casa Sanchez promotion, and it even has photos of some dedicated patrons and their tattoos. The second link leads to a video news report from the ABC affiliate station in San Francisco on this rather unique promotion. Moving on, the third link leads to a basic guide to the Mission District created by the San Francisco Chronicle. The fourth link will take users to a page from the Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco, which tells the story of the founding of the Mission Dolores, which is the structure that gives the neighborhood its name. Culinary historians will enjoy the fifth link, which provides a detailed history of the foodways of Mexico and Highland Central America. Finally, the last link leads to an exploration of the history of tattoos, courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution.