Psychological Evidence Behind Tattoos and Trauma

Tattoos have long been intertwined with culture, identity, and rebellion—but in recent years, they've also become the subject of deeper psychological inquiry, especially in relation to trauma. While initial reports highlighted that many trauma survivors turn to tattoos as a "coping mechanism" or "form of expression," feedback has made it clear: we need to go deeper.

Rather than settling on surface-level generalizations, we should explore the psychological mechanisms that may drive tattoo acquisition post-trauma. One plausible hypothesis is that tattoos serve as a form of self-verification—a way to regain a sense of coherence and control over identity after it has been destabilized by trauma. For some, the permanence of ink provides a counterpoint to the impermanence of safety, love, or self-worth they've previously experienced.

Another possible explanation lies in embodied cognition. Research suggests that physical alterations to the body can alter internal emotional states. For trauma survivors, tattooing—especially in areas associated with prior harm or vulnerability—may serve as a tactile form of emotional reprocessing. The pain of the needle itself may also invoke a cathartic release, aligning with studies on pain offset relief, which demonstrate how controlled physical pain can produce short-term emotional regulation.

Of course, there's a key distinction to be made between correlation and causation. While studies, including one cited from Germany, have found higher incidences of childhood trauma among those with tattoos, this does not mean that tattoos are a direct result of trauma. Rather, they may reflect a broader set of behavioral patterns—risk-taking, identity exploration, or social signaling—that become more pronounced in individuals with unresolved psychological wounds.

Additionally, tattoos may function as narrative anchors. Survivors of trauma often struggle to construct coherent life stories. Tattoos—especially those with symbolic or mythological resonance like Medusa—can help externalize these narratives, acting as visual milestones in one’s journey toward healing or transformation.

That said, it’s crucial not to paint all tattooed individuals with a single psychological brush. Many people, including those who have never experienced trauma, are drawn to tattoos for cultural, aesthetic, or even spiritual reasons. Some celebrate the ritual of body modification as a form of belonging to tribal or ancestral traditions, while others simply enjoy the art.

The cultural divide is real. Critics still associate tattoos with promiscuity, rebellion, or poor decision-making—sometimes in overtly misogynistic terms, as seen in comments labeling tattooed women as having a “high body count” or “self-identifying 304s.” These reactions say more about societal biases than the inked individuals themselves.

Meanwhile, tattoo enthusiasts—many of whom have been getting inked since adolescence—often view the practice as a lifelong journey of self-discovery and connection. As one heavily tattooed commenter reflected, “One day I kind of asked myself, why did I start doing this?” That introspective question reveals the deeper layers behind a seemingly simple act.

In the end, tattoos are not inherently trauma-linked—but for some, they become a canvas where pain, power, and purpose intersect. Whether you're drawn to the ink for healing, heritage, or purely for art, understanding the psychological undercurrents invites a more empathetic—and scientifically rigorous—conversation.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Podcasting since two thousand and five. This is the King
of Podcasts radio network, kingo Podcasts dot com. Following up
on a story I did about tattoos and piercings, a
writer writes, imagine if you actually presented hypotheses on the
psychological mechanisms responsible for the behavior, beyond it being a
copy mechanism or form of expression. Okay, I'll take you

(00:24):
up on it.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
We're all a little depraved and debaucherous.

Speaker 1 (00:32):
Here is the King of Podcasts, speak of podcasts. Here
this is the Prey and de botres. And I'm doing
a take too on this, pissing me off because I
had recorded this all completely thirty minutes and you know,
here we go take two. I guess that's just the
way things are. Website is Kingopodcasts dot com. You can

(00:54):
find this brig on all my other programs and one
of the episodes you'll find of this series which you
can find on Apple podcast Spotify, I a radio all
the platforms. Is a story I did back in September
of twenty twenty two where I talked about why trauma
leads to a ton of tattoos and piercings. So I'm

(01:17):
gonna bring up a little bit of what I played
on there. We're gonna play a couple of clips for
you just to get you caught up in all this
because everything's all fresh on my wie, so I can
actually really go through this and easily and run through
all this really quickly for all of you. So, first
of all, September sixth, twenty twenty two is when I
presented the case about why trauma leads to a ton
of tattoos. It got quite a bit of flack. But anyway,

(01:41):
I want to play a clip of what I talked
about on that episode again three years ago. Roughly three
years ago. It is something that happened for a long
time ago. So now many people partaking them to express
personnel or esthetic, as I said, but there are others
where tattooed and pierced individuals are linked to having lower
self as theme and a higher needed for uniqueness. Trauma

(02:03):
survivors may turn to body modification as a way to
overcome past experiences, which is a coping mechanism. You're using
tattoos as a coping mechanism. And I mean I'm talking
to some girls that have talked to on dating sites
that have definitely admitted to that that's why they did it,
because they went through some traumatic relationship or something toxic

(02:24):
or some kind of abuse when they were younger or
not too long ago, where they said, well, I'm going
to just start doing getting ink on myself because it's
just what I feel, and it's not just something that
just conceal and it's just something that as a meaning
to you that maybe you just hold on for yourself.
But when you're making it prominent and really showcasing, that's

(02:47):
the difference. Got a lot of flag for that episode,
but what I did get was a mixed bag of
commentary about what I said. So at this time I
really didn't get any comments about this until eight months ago.
Just to phase rights, it's probably best to look at

(03:09):
actual studies before making such claims, So I'm gonna present
those tonight. Rich Sherman three seven three rights. Tattoos lover,
tattooed lovers, unite, tattoo haters, just stay quiet, keeps the peace.
Rod d one T wrote and said, tattoos high body count.
I love the fact that these three zero fours are

(03:30):
self identifying. Of course, if a man is in a
relationship with a tattooed. Then they at least know what
they are getting into. Now we got more coming in
just two weeks ago. I got more comments here and
this is where I said, well, I'm gonna just run
right in here. One of the personsys, you have valid points.
I won't argue against your findings on the Zeke eleven.

(03:53):
And then I had another person that wrote me telling
your own first person to account little E for six one,
saying that my ex tattooed his entire upper body. He
never gave an explanation. He likes it, and he especially
likes it when people stopped to look at it. Stop
him to look at it. Is there's something deeper going on.
I wish I knew we were still friends, but he

(04:14):
did spend four thousand dollars in all those tattoos. And
then some of the other comments I got was this
was halfway very informative and halfway one sided. I think
it's more cause versus correlation that you need to look into,
which I will go into today. And then I had
someone else to actually give their own first person account
of being thirty six years old getting tattoos since they

(04:36):
were fourty years old, and being coming heavily tattooed and
bringing up stories about studies in Germany about the correlation
between tattoos and childhood trauma. And then I got the
most recent one yesterday from the Electric Cheese Productions twenty two. So,
just to reiterate, they write, imagine if you actually presented

(04:57):
hypotheses on the psychological mechanisms versus as possible for the
behavior beyond it being a quote unquote coping mechanism or
a quote unquote form of expression end quote. These are hollow,
superficial presentations and tell us virtually nothing more than what
we've already had in our heads. You spend ten minutes
communicating the fact that some studies find some correlation between

(05:17):
trauma and tattoo acquisition, than repeating some concerns you have, which,
by the way, the episode itself only ran ten minutes,
so he's saying the whole episode I spent on that.
I used to do a thing where the episodes were
much shorter, but then I realized when I did a
thirty minute format, I would do like smaller episodes than
I did. A thirty minute show on this night Tuesday

(05:37):
nights as I record, and then I decided to go
just throw with the thirty minute route because it worked
and people really got into it. So fast forward to today.
Now we have this story that comes in. So I'm
going to go ahead and start running through the research
we've already talked about on the program, add some more
and a few things that are trending right now that

(05:58):
would add more to what's going on that people should
be aware of, and that's becoming much more, you know, commonplace.
That proved my point, and I hope it does tonight. Now.
I talked about the correlation about how tattoos were said

(06:18):
to be a coping mechanism, that there's a correlation between
tattoos and trauma, and that the amount of people that
went through traumatic events out of one thousand plus people
in the study that I talked about in twenty twenty two,
that forty six percent had gotten a tattoo and they
had suffered from some traumatic event traumatic act. But again,

(06:43):
if you want to go back and look at that story,
you can look back at that for that past episode,
and I had the link for it in the description
of that study. But I'm going to move forward now.
There was a research article about tattoos in the wig
of trauma transforming personal stories of suffering into public stories
of coping. So if you want an actual story that
talks about this deading behavior, has this story. It's in

(07:07):
the publications of Taylor and Francis online. So that's the
research article. Laura Crompton is the author, the lead author
in this published March fourteen, twenty twenty. Now in the
abstract itself, it says that growing numbers of trauma survivors
has chosen to cope with their ongoing in visible wounds

(07:29):
through tattooing their bodies. That includes individuals as well as
organized and documented projects held in public spaces. This topic
of body modification through tattoos has benefited from an explosion
in academic interests, but there's been a little attention directed
as to examining how tactoo practices may be understood as
a means of coping with trauma within a contemporary cultural context.

(07:52):
With while drawing on psychological and cultural studies perspectives, they
explored the meanings attributed to tattoos by trauma survivors, analyzing
documented personal accounts of tattooed survivors in different countries, and
they illustrated how being tattooed appears to be a personal
way of coping with trauma as well as the cultural
practice of meaning making. So the meaning is attributed by

(08:14):
these trauma surviwers included exposing the trauma for recognition, witnessing
meaningfulness of the tattoo, connection, control, and transformation, and the
meaning making process appears to be continuous and dynamic, shaped
by psychological responses, social interactions, and cultural narratives. So, just
to clarify what I said about the twenty twenty two study,

(08:34):
I want to make sure I read this here. That
forty percent of participants had at least one tattoo or piercing,
and approximately a fourth of those participants reported significant child
abuse or neglect. And among those reporting child abuse, forty
eight percent had a chattoo or piercing. Thirty five percent
of people not reporting child abuse had a tattoo or piercing,

(08:54):
So it's more than half in this case. Let's go
to another case that just recently got published, Combat Trauma
and inc a study exploring tattoos as psychological resources and soldiers.
There was a series of interviews published in Stress and Health.
They spoke with eight Israeli combat soldiers revealing that their

(09:16):
tattoos were closely tied to military experiences and emotional distress,
and these tattoos served as coping mechanisms and the soldiers processes.
That makes sense at the time of the military according
to what they said here now, these combat soldiers were
tattooed either during the military service or shortly after being discharged,

(09:37):
and they were often kind of the dramatic events that
they had experienced to just participation in extended combat injuries
or the injury, death or suicide of fellow soldiers. Two
female participants in these of the eight participants raged between
twenty one and twenty nine years old, and again Israeli
combat soldiers. These are not the easiest of people and

(09:58):
this number. If you know about Israeli people, they all
have to serve at some point in the armed forces
as part of their life in Israel. So these are
just pulled from the gamut and brought into the military
servants to be armed forces soldiers. They didn't specify which

(10:21):
ones and the females are males in here, but they
said that four were single, four were married. Six other
participants had up to three tattoos, one had six, one
had fifteen and most of them were related to military service.
When they talked to the individual soldiers, one person recalled
that when I was discharged, I thought about it a lot,
about my commander, about the bullets flying over my head,

(10:44):
I see who in blood and everything. And there were
two themes that they said they have found out of
the whole story. First was military events and the distressed
soldiers endured services in the background from many of their tattoos.
The tattoos that gets mementos of traumatic eas events that
they lived through. The second theme was that tattoos served
as a resource for coping with stress. Three of those

(11:06):
participants got tattooed, helping to reduce stress by allowing them
to express and relive their emotions. One of the said
that mostly some of the tattoos helped me lower my
stress level and be calmer. I got actually boiled with
stress in certain situations, but when I think of the
tattoos being a part of what I experienced, I am
calmer and less stressed by the situation. And other participants

(11:29):
view their tatoos as the sources of strength and empowerment,
giving positive meaning to their hardships. So there's yet another
story that comes into this case. Now let's go into
something else that's becoming common, the meeting Medusa TikTok trend.
There's a lot behind this story, so let's going to
go to this. So since twenty twenty two, there have

(11:53):
been TikTok videos have been coming out leading users to
wonder about the meaning of the phrase meaning Medusa and
being saddened to learn that its code for incidents of
sexual violence. And certain rings of the myth Medusa say
that she met herself in Poseidon assaulted her in a
sacred shrine, the shrine of the goddess Athena, and Medusa

(12:14):
was apparently a very beautiful woman, a young woman who
was serving at the behest of virgin as a virgin
priestess at the Behest of Athena, but then was cast
out by Athena once she was violated by Poseidon. So
this trend has been accelerating as of twenty twenty four,

(12:35):
and survivors started showing off their Medusa tattoos on TikTok.
Awareness of the meaning behind the symbol spread, shocking those
who didn't know. Many had suffered as trauma, so it's
brought up people that will put up stories and say
I will never forget the day I met Medusa and
then references to meeting Medusa have appeared in comments and
videos for years, but awareness didn't spread until much of

(12:56):
outside of survivor communities until twenty twenty four. Statistics in
the National Library of Medicine that last up did it
in August way twenty three. They say that twenty six
percent of girls five percent of boys experienced some form
of this traumatic assault that happens more quite often happens
more than once. So one particular TikTok video shows a

(13:18):
caption that says life is so private, no one knows
I have met Medusa before when I was seven, eight, nine,
ten years old. And then. The earliest of these videos
was October second, twenty twenty two. User Hello Kitty my
bff told her tale to the metaphor of her first
meeting Medusa at age nine and continue to encounter her
through the years as the mythical figure expressed sadness and

(13:40):
encouraged her to speak out. Now, some modit rings will
claim that Medussa was given the power to turn others
into storm and was not a punishment, but it was
because Athena granted the victim of assault the power to
defend herself in the future. So the Medusa dynamic is
a femtict interpretation. It embodies who a young modern feminist

(14:04):
woman is today, the independent woman that doesn't need a man,
that wants a man only to go and pay for
a discussionary income and support her because of a pretty
privilege like a Medusa. And I'll tell you I never
even thought about the correlation with Medusa, because I never
even thought about the origin of Medusa. Because the only

(14:25):
recollection I've ever had of Medusa at all was the
movie Classes of Titans, which is based on great mythology,
and we only saw Medusa when she was able to
turn men into stone and had the snakes and all
the things going around, and that was the only way
to go and see it. But never knew that originally
Medusa was a young, beautiful woman, a virgin priestist. Which

(14:49):
is the amazing that it is the feminist interpretation and
that this dynamic comes into play. There's a tattooed artist
in July twenty twenty four that went viral with the
demonstration of his real learning the meaning behind Medusa, and
he wrote in caption quote POV. After doing hundreds of
Medusa tattoos, someone finally tells you what they actually mean

(15:11):
and its fall. His face falls into grief and he says,
I'm so sorry. Parade Magazine, maybe you've heard of that publication.
It's a little in certain used to have in the
maga and the newspapers back in the day on Sundays
when people still got it. Someone paper paper newspapers are
still a thing. Parade Magazine spoke with therapist Anita asked
the lead like Rick asked, Lee, never gonna give you

(15:34):
up yond that one. On the symbolism behind Medusa tattoos
for survivors, she says, quote, I believe the Medusa tattoo
is the perfect visual depiction of a survivor's journey from
paying to resilience, strength, empowerment, and self preservation. That protective
symbol as she has the ability to destroy those who
are a threat to her being. This tattoos says a

(15:54):
thousand words and is a permanent stambu survivorship not hiding
but is playing it for all the world to see.
And with that said, I want to go ahead and
play for you now a TikTok video that has come
out recently. That makes the point. And this is from
TikTok user Hannah go more thirteen.

Speaker 3 (16:13):
So I'm on my way to get another session done
on a Medusa tattoo on my side. And like many
other people, Medusa to me symbolizes surviving essay. You know,
when it happened when I was twenty one, I spent
three months where I literally couldn't leave my house. I
was too afraid to even walk the dog outside. I

(16:35):
was just paralyzed by fear. And if the version of
me that was freshly post essay that literally couldn't leave
the house could see me today, I thinks they would
be completely shocked why that we're still here. And two
that I'm able to do so much by myself now.

(16:55):
And it's not to say that I don't still live
with fear. You know, if I see someone that looks
like those people like not a good time. I still
have nightmares. Things are can still be pretty rough. But
the fact that I'm able to go places by myself now,
I can go to my job no problems. Now I
can travel by myself like I never thought I'd really

(17:20):
truly never thought that I would be at a point
where I could do those things again. So yeah, anyways,
I'm getting this tattoo to kind of symbolize the fact
that I survived and I'm doing great.

Speaker 1 (17:36):
I mean, it's a shame that he has to go
through that already and that she did, and I mean
it is an important first step that she's able to
go ahead and find her way to go and you know,
find out how she can get back into her life
again after something's suffering something so traumatic. But it's one
of those areas where depending on how she wanted to

(17:58):
go ahead and handle getting yourself treatment, if she decided
to get treatment for it, or if not she wanted
to move on with her life and not bring it
up at all. That's okay, I understand that part. But
it's one of those things where I mean, there's only
so much I guess that parents can do or we
can all do to prevent children or just you know,

(18:22):
loved ones from having something like this happened to them
twenty one years old. It's unfortunate. And of course we
talk about on this program all the different toxic relationships
that are out there, the narcissism, the controlling, the gas lighting,
all this stuff. We have no clue as to what
happened to her. But the fact of the matter is
that the Medusa tattoo symbolizes for her it's a coping mechanism,

(18:44):
and because of her getting this and going through the
process of getting that Medusa tattoo, it helps her to
live her life. I'm not disputing that. I'm not discouraging
it at all, but I hope that young girl is
able to go ahead and find her way to not
lose who she was before that, because that's the part
she's talking about. She's saying that she's a different person

(19:04):
than before. And for some people, that's absolutely fine. They
want to go ahead and go that rout. They want
to go ahead and go through the route of being
who they were before. Because I was in a naivete
or just the innocence of the youth that they were,
you know that something could happen to them anyway. That
was something that could have been inevitable and not preventable.

(19:25):
In my case, I just want to make it where
I keep looking at tattoos as a sign of coping.
But I would hope that people will not just choose
to go and get tattoos just to go ahead and
go through coping. Totally a favor for those that want

(19:46):
to get tattoos for expression, for symbolism, for meaning of
everything else. But when it has to be done for trauma,
there's something that's concerning to me. And that's why I
brought up this issue three year years ago on the
previous episode, and I've done it a couple other times
since then, and I'm only bringing it back because people
did comment about it. I got comments about the tattoo stuff,

(20:09):
and I'm glad because I remember when I first put
that episode out, it didn't get much traction at all. Somewhere,
somehow it caught traction. People caught onto it, found the episode,
you know what, fourteen months later, but hey, thank you
for finding the show, and they listened to it, and
I got a decent amount of views, well than I
get for some of my episodes, but I'm happy to

(20:32):
say that. Look, I mean, my YouTube channel's been up
there for eight years and that's like one of the
top ten videos I have on the channel. I didn't
expect it to go that high, but I thought, well,
people want to go in and hear about this, and
I would love to hear other people's stories about this
and understand if my correlations the research the evidence I'm

(20:55):
trying to present now the studies that I've been talking
about here tonight. So I hope that some of you,
if you're catching us on the YouTube channel, and if
you're not, find the YouTube channel at King of Podcasts,
find the episode and comment there. I love to go
and go back and do a follow ups episode on
this and get some feedback on this. I'm'd love to

(21:16):
go and find out more about that and see what
you think about it yourselves. The other thing I want
to bring up to which is important is in my
evidence trying to go and show the correlation. The evidence
is not just my own first person account of thousands
of women I've talked to from the dating sites. Right.
I talked about that, and there was something that was there.

(21:39):
I was able to go ahead and correlate with the
women that I was talking to, the ones that didn't
have any tattoos and the ones that did, and the
stories they had that they told me. And of course
people were gonna tell me, oh they give you some
just kind of smoke whatever, they were just telling you
something else. No, maybe there were some people that did,

(21:59):
but I don't think all and did I think I
got told more of the truth than I did than not,
because again I would talk to a number of these
girls about my own experiences, of which I never went after.
Tattoos wasn't my coping mechanism. But one of the things
was that, you know, several years ago before I started

(22:19):
this series, whatever I can talk that I would not
speak about here, but like privately I've said that, you know,
we have traumatic events we've gone through and experience, but
it's one of those things where, well, how do you
go ahead and handle it? The tattoos is a coping
make because it's one way to do that, but there's

(22:40):
also the way that you know if therapy works for you,
which I've done it twice and I think it has
been effective. But one of the things I think more
than anything is is that I wanted to be able
to reflect and understand my behavior as a result of
the things that happened and why things did not work
out for me like it did, which is why I'm

(23:01):
chronically single today. I needed to understand that. So I've
taken my time to go and learn about that, and
I think I've taken time to go and reflect. But
now I'm at a day age where you know this,
the world has changed since I actually got myself here
to this point, because now we're at a point where

(23:23):
women have definitely gone a different route. Social media has
definitely amplified the idea of being independent, but it's like,
not even more so than that. Now there's just a
lot of delusional, blindsided kind of thinking now that women
are starting to get because they're being in doctrinated by
some of the women are on here thinking oh, well,

(23:44):
we don't need a man, we don't need relationships, we
don't need thing at all. Because there's like the most
worst possible scenario of women and their thoughts about men.
And also the fact of the younger men that are
being raised now, they're not masculine, they're not ready to
go and be with a woman and know how to
handle and appreciate a woman for who they are and
what they provide. But you asked the question, what is

(24:07):
it that a woman provides in a relationship and what
a man provides a relationship two different things. But now
we're at the point where relationships are different now, I mean,
and it's even more obvious that people are not trying
to date each other not as much. And one of
the things for me, I'll be honest with you, is

(24:27):
that the more women I see out there with tattoos,
the more I don't have an interest. Tattoos for me
are an absolute deal breaker one hundred and fifty percent,
because the thing is, I try to keep myself a
clean slate, and of course I've got my wounds and
my marks that can be apparent as to why you know,

(24:48):
I'm not perfect at all either, But for me to
look for somebody that I could start fresh with that
will give me an actually open chance to go ahead
and be in a relationship with me that's not going
to go and go through being materialistic or make it
all about sex and money or sex level money, and
it's like there's no love behind any relationship. I don't

(25:08):
want that either. Like I'm trying to get my mind
reset and start fresh if I can do that, and
for me to do that, I have to find somebody
younger than me, not someone that's older, someoney younger. So
I look at that, but then I see what's going
on with these younger people and what they're going through
men and women, And there's a reason why my show's

(25:29):
gotten a good response among younger women and younger adults
would like because I'm trying to go and spread a
message that hey, if you disagree, fine, but let's get
the dialogue going. Let's get the conversation going about it anyway,
because there's something about what I'm saying here. That's why
I thought it was important to talk about this. One
of the story I want to bring up here is

(25:51):
a story that's being talked about in Canada and the
Greater Toronto area of Canada that they are doing more
with tattoo removal. And then the story They also talked
about the story of Pete Davidson, the SNL cast member
that was there for so much time. He does quite
a bit now in movies. He doesn't stand up, he

(26:13):
has commercials he's in, so he's doing just fine. But
he's gone through the process and they'll say in the
story of removing over two hundred tattoos off his body
over all these years, he's been out there at thirty
one years old and now decided I'm going to get
rid of all of them, maybe keep a couple, he
says it in the interview here, but taking two hundred

(26:35):
thousand dollars and over five years since twenty twenty to
start removing all of them completely. Here's a story from
CTV News talking about this very story, writing huh.

Speaker 2 (26:48):
At Tony Tona's Tattoos studio in Mississauga, not only does
he create vibrant tattoos for his customers, he also uses
lasers to remove them. Tonas says, there are many reasons
why some one may want to have a tattoo removed.

Speaker 1 (27:02):
You're now able to remove a pre existing or old
tattoo that you may either regret or you may have
some life changes or career change as well.

Speaker 2 (27:11):
A laser is used to break up the ink beneath
the skin, and the price and amount of time to
remove a tattoo will depend on its size, depth, and
the colors used.

Speaker 1 (27:21):
Feels great. I feel like of some of my mistakes
are certain to get removed. Now some of your tattoos
are going away. Yeah I've been burning them off. Yeah yeah,
they're almost gone. Is it painful?

Speaker 2 (27:32):
It is horrible. Comedian Pete Davidson used to have over
two hundred tattoos, but by using laser tattoo removal he's
gotten rid of almost everyone. Are you going to keep
any maybe like two or three, but I'm trying to
clean slate it. Removery has five tattoo removal locations in
the GTA. The company says, while about twenty percent of

(27:54):
its customers remove a tattoo so they can get another one,
others are looking to make a start.

Speaker 1 (28:00):
Often you can get a name of an X in
the relationship doesn't work out, something misspelled. You can have
a tattoo you got when you're eighteen and you know
you're thirty five or forty just no longer resembles who
you are.

Speaker 2 (28:15):
Well, the laser can be painful. There are numbing creams
that can help. You usually need to wait about four
to six weeks between treatments, so removing a tattoo can
take as long as a year, requiring six to twelve visits.

Speaker 1 (28:28):
It's a lot, but people are willing now to instead
of going through the trouble of going to a tattoo artist.
And this was something I was thinking about as well.
How many tattoo artists have had to become therapists for
some of these clients of theirs. When they're in there,
obviously they're spending hours sitting there working in the needle

(28:52):
and it's almost like you're at a dentist's office. Yet
you just got start to gap. One of the things
I may mention of too before is that and where
I live in Palmage County, there's the Wellington Mall, the
mall at Wellington Green, and they have a big tattoo
part are sitting there that as prime real estate. It's
there an entrance right next to the apartment store and

(29:14):
they got a huge space, it's like twenty by thirty
foot space to have several booths, a big showcase section
of all their piercing jewelry, and you know all the
books they have of the tattoos they can offer to
people that want to buy. Listen, they make good business
in there among all the stories that are in that mall.

(29:35):
If I had to name the top three most traveled
two stores besides the food court, you would have to
say the Apple Store, Pandora, and this tattoo parlor. It's
all of it. They're all consumed in that. Okay. I
see a lot of parents that will take their kids
in there that are probably sixteen, seventeen, eight years old

(29:55):
to go get their first tattoo, and it's accepting. Think
about the fact that. Okay, sure, there's tattoo regret. We
see a lot of those stories like that. Now tattoo
removal for the tattoo artists. Oh, think about that. They
can get all this extra money on tattoo removal and

(30:15):
then have these same clients that came in for one
tattoo and then I would come back and get another
one and another one. Now they're gonna come back in
to get one of them off, another one off, and
another one off, or had to go and go through
the process of getting some of them taken off. I mean,
is that enough evidence enough to show you that maybe

(30:38):
I'm a little bit right about all this? I hope so,
because I'm trying, I think I have caught on to
something here. So I hope there's enough evidence here to
prove my point. And for all of you that are
out there that wanted to find out if I could
come up with this kind of effort information and say, okay,

(31:00):
here's what I think is actually happening, well, I hope
I did. I really do. And I'm not going to
go any quirky without any kind of clothes tonight. I'm
just gonna say that, Hey, you know, it's okay if
you have tattoos, if you get them for whatever kind
of symbolism or freedom of expression that you have, that's fine.
We all have our little wiss all are things we
want to do. But I also want to make sure

(31:21):
that people that get tattoos they want to get in
for what they want and hopefully aston as a COVID
mechanism or as a way to go ahead and conceal
some traumatic event that hopefully you don't have to go through. Meantime,
we all like to be a little to prey and
the Batris