why we regret our tattoos
500+ survey replies detail the effects of trend cycles, sourceless pinterest inspo, friendship anxiety and more
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During one utterly unremarkable spring day in 2022, I woke up with a gust of mental clarity. I was ready to get a tattoo. This was different from wanting to get a tattoo. The desire had been brewing for a while, but now I was committed to a date a time a deposit a design. In my head, it was already done.
So, I flew the brief hour to LA and Ubered to an Arts District warehouse off the 10 to get a pair of mary janes inked into my skin. To my pleasant surprise, it didn’t hurt at all. It just made my pits sweat profusely. This remains my favorite tattoo. In the course of that year, I got five more.
And it was FUN. I booked a second appointment, then a third. Months passed. New lines and shapes sprouted along my left arm. In hindsight, I was going through some chaotic internal turmoil and tattoos made me feel like I was in control of my life. There was no higher high: getting fresh ink at that warehouse tattoo studio, speedwalking under the blighted freeway underpass to Maru to drink a bowel-wrecking matcha, people watching and being watched because people there appreciate a cutout Allina Liu gingham dress more than here. I could do this on loop forever, I thought.
Now, here we are. My tattoo collection is an integral part of my style. Without tattoos, I look like a Dust Bowl bunker sister wife when I wear long cotton frocks of the Doen variety. The same dress with tattoos feels totally different: a rebel! hair in the wind! snaking through the southwest in a convertible with a beat-up suitcase in the backseat full of antique candlesticks!
Do I ever regret my tattoos? Well, sometimes I look in the mirror after getting out the shower and wish I could see my skin completely blank again. Sometimes I look at the teeth drawings along my rib midline and wonder what the fuck I was thinking with that placement. Sometimes I love it—and most days, I don’t think about it at all.
Tattoo regret has always existed…
because people have always been people. I imagine cavewomen sat around the fire, talking about how the bison was a bit too chewy today, how they wish the inked dots along their arms were smaller or bigger.
Obviously tattoo culture has changed tremendously throughout our societal evolution. In the early 20th century, tattoos were still associated with convicts and general criminality. Fast forward to the 1950s, when tattoos started becoming popular again among punk/rock subcultures. But it wasn’t until the 1970s that tattoos started seeping into mass consumer culture and snowballed from there.
Now, ink is IN. Tattoo tourism has been booming. You can find millions of designs on the internet. Sketched sardines, fineline flowers, cartoon Snoopys—just a click away on Pinterest or Instagram. In a world where it’s never been more normalized to get tattoos, what’s causing tattoo regret?
One conversation that’s been trending online recently is women worrying their tattoos will look ugly in a wedding dress. See example TikToks below. Most comments lean supportive in sentiment, something along the lines of: misogynistic beauty standards make us feel that tattoos are unattractive/”dirty”, tattoos are unique and part of a person’s story and therefore beautiful. I wholeheartedly agree. At the same time, I think it takes vulnerability to say you might not like how your body art looks in a wedding dress and we should let people have the space to express that.
It’s no coincidence this conversation is striking a cultural nerve on the heels of twin trend demons Clean Girl and Quiet Luxury, which are both rooted in aspirational whiteness. Under clean girl aesthetic standards, your tattoos should be dainty and minimalist like Miss Hailey Bieber’s. Tattoos have been siphoned up into the churn of fashion industry trend cycles. They’re sold as accessories for a Personal Brand™, along with reading the right books and eating at the right restaurants. Sometimes I look at the Lisa Says Gah t-shirts with the assorted little food motifs on them and think, they literally look like a flash design page. Are you a Pasta Scene girl or Tapas Scene girl?
The difference is, tattoos aren’t a pair of Susan Alexandra martini olive earrings you can take on and off. They’re permanent (basically). And if you make a high-commitment body art decision off of a trending aesthetic, you might end up regretting it. The more tattoos permeate fashion and become covert status signals, the more susceptible they are to the inevitable trend death traps of fast fashion.
I wanted to engage with this topic beyond TikTok and hear from real, regular people who aren’t potentially posting about tattoo regret for engagement bait. So I ran a survey, and received 510 responses (thank you so much to everyone who took the time to reply!).
The high-level finding is that regret is actually more common than not.
I read all 309 survey replies from people who regret their tattoos and their reasons for why.
There were three major cultural + social themes that stood out to me, that I’ll analyze below alongside snippets of riveting, emotionally honest firsthand accounts of tattoo regret: