Tattoo Takeover: Regrets, Feelings, And Much More

Did you know that the oldest tattoo on a human body was found on a mummy? And not one – but 61 tattoos!

So, this art is by no means new.

For centuries, tattoos have been a common way of self-expression and society status expression. And until this day tattoos remain the main method of body art for people all over the world.

You may not know, but the word itself comes from the Tahitian word ‘tatau’ which means ‘mark’. And therefore tattooing means ‘marking oneself’. It makes sense, right?

No matter if you’re looking for a new tattoo or trying to add one more to your body, you should be informed about the main facts and statistics about tattoos and the industry overall. By the way, they’re interesting as well. 

If this sounds interesting, just keep scrolling. We have some juicy facts and stats for you.

First, a few facts about the Americans

If one thing is for sure it’s that younger generations are bigger fans of tattoos than the older ones. In the US, 47% of the Millenials claim that they have at least one tattoo, which is almost half of the generation.

On the other hand, 36% of Gen Xers say that they have at least one tattoo compared to the 13% of Baby Boomers. The stats show that young people become more open-minded and supportive of body art. 

Rural and Urban Americans tend to be more likely to have a tattoo with 35% in comparison with the Suburban Americans which say that only 25% of them could be into that.

An interesting fact is that 43% of those people who have kids in their household are more likely to be supportive of tattoos than 21% of the people without kids in their homes. Luckily for the kids these days, their parents are much more open-minded than before, right?

And we thought that you might ask if political orientation has some influence on the decision about getting a tattoo, but it doesn’t. The percentages are almost equal between Republicans (27%), Democrats (29%), and Independent (28%).

Regrets, I have some…

Not a biggie, we all have regrets. 

So, when it comes to tattoos, the majority of people who have them on their bodies do not regret them. And the main reason for that is that tattoos have a strong meaning for them or they simply love this kind of art. But 17% of the people with tattoos regret them. And the most common reason that causes regret is: “It’s the name of another person”. Ouch… We get that. But the good thing is that they can cover it with a brand new one that they’ll love!

Well, not always their ex’s name is the reason to regret getting a tattoo. There can be a bunch of other reasons, such as:

• Getting a tattoo at a very young age 
• They don’t match their lifestyle at this point in time
• The tattoo is meaningless (they got it just for fun at the time)
• It’s awfully done… Well, this one is a real thing we got here.

Tattoos make people feel sexy

More than a third of adults claim that having a tattoo on their body makes them feel more sexy and passionate. And, another 32% of them say that the main feeling that having a tattoo causes is that they feel more attractive and more confident about themselves.

Also, there are that 31% of people say that having a tattoo makes them feel more rebellious and dangerous. And on the other side of that same coin are the 20% of people who feel more spiritual after they got their tattoos.

And there are some people who feel more intelligent and more healthy with their tattoos. But these are very few, around 23%.

Sure, there are also people that their feelings didn’t change after getting a tattoo or two.

Do others see tattooed people as gangsters?

Well, statistics show that 45% of the people without tattoos (which is almost half) see people with tattoos as more rebellious than those without. The thing here is that this percentage declined through the years.

Another fact that we got from people without tattoos is that 47% of them find tattooed people less attractive, 44% think that they are less sexy, and 34% of them think that people with tattoos are less respectable.

An unusual finding was that three in ten people without tattoos find the tattooed ones less intelligent, less healthy, and less spiritual.

Tattooed professionals? No big deal.

Professionals with tattoos? Well, no biggie these days. Majorities of Americans would be comfortable seeing someone with visible tattoos serve in positions across a broad variety of sectors and professions, further emphasizing the idea of tattoos becoming mainstream. 

Athletes, IT technicians, and chefs had the highest levels of comfort, with 86%, 81%, and 78%, accordingly. Primary school teachers, judges, and presidential candidates have the lowest levels of comfort, with 59%.

Many Americans, particularly Millennials, would be “absolutely comfortable” with someone in different professions, such as police officers, real estate brokers, bankers, doctors, judges, and presidential candidates, who have visible tattoos.

That’s all well and good, but when it comes to who interacts with their children, parents are bound to have their own set of standards, right? Wrong. In reality, the second poll of parents with children under the age of 18 indicated that a large majority of them are fine (approximately four out of ten are “very” fine) with adults with visible tattoos working in a variety of roles that entail contact with children.

Let’s get into more specific data, ok?

So, we got some very interesting, specific, and detailed data about tattoos and how different people perceive them and feel about them. Plus, we requested a brief opinion of professionals in the industry that supports our findings.

We divided all the topics that may interest you into concrete questions and put the data into tables to give you a more specific and visual look at how things stand.

Enough talking, let’s go to it.

The number of tattoos the average person has

How many tattoos do you have? 

This is the first question that everybody wants to know the answer to. Of course, assuming that we also asked people without tattoos. We were looking for people that have permanent ink-based tattoos on their bodies and that have not removed them. So, we made sure that participants don’t count their temporary tattoos, nor their bubble gum tattoos. Just permanent, ink-based tattoos.

The first finding is that most people actually do not have any tattoos on them. Yes, this percentage declined through the years but non-tattooed people remain on the top.

Well, what actually was a surprise is that the majority of people contacted have not one, but two tattoos on them. And the percentages of the people that have one, three, four, or more tattoos are pretty much the same. 

And of course, again Millennials are the leading generation that has tattoos. But, X Gens are also pretty liberal, you know? 

And actually, the difference between Urban, Rural, and Suburban people are not that big. And again it was confirmed that people who have children in their households tend to be more open-minded towards tattoos and therefore have at least one on themselves.

How many tattoos a person has? (as per TheHarrisPoll)

The importance of tattoo trends

We talked with these people also about tattoo trends. Some people like to follow fashion trends, including putting tattoo art on their bodies. And others like to stick to something original and something that has a specific meaning just for them. And of course, there are also those who like traditional tattoos.

So, let’s see what the stats say.

From the findings, you can see that people in their mid and late twenties are most likely to follow current tattoo trends. Not that people in their thirties don’t but they are slight “behind”. So, we come to the conclusion that Millenials are very attached to any trend that comes by, and tattoo art is not an exception.

When it comes to gender, there is not much difference between male and female aspirations for trends. Also, the political background and views don’t differ that much when it comes to following trends. Republicans, Democrats, and Independents have all around the same percentage of getting a trendy tattoo, so we can say that political orientation is not much of a factor.

Tattoo trends (as per TheHarrisPoll)

Regrets for getting a tattoo

We mentioned this topic previously. This question was asked because it’s the most common one that comes to one’s mind when talking about tattoos. Do you regret it?

Well, like every other thing in life, people tend to often have second thoughts, never mind how strong and confident they felt about it at the time. And considering that tattoos stay on one’s body for a lifetime it is quite normal to regret it sometimes.

So, in order not to assume anything, people were asked. And the base was to ask people that currently have tattoos anywhere on their bodies.

But you’ll be surprised that only a quarter of the people that currently have at least one tattoo regret committing such a decision. And that means that the majority of people are still having the same feeling and confidence about their tattoos – like at the time they did it. It must have a very significant meaning to them, right?

Ever regret getting a tattoo? (as per TheHarrisPoll)

So, let’s go through the main reasons for regretting having a tattoo. We mentioned these reasons back at the top of this article, but let’s see the percentages now. Neither one is a surprise.

Why regret getting a tattoo? (as per TheHarrisPoll)

The feeling that tattoo gets me

Let’s see how having tattoos makes people feel. Yes, we went trough this earlier, but let’s check some percentages and numbers that confirm the statements. 

As you probably expected, tattoos make people feel more sexy, more attractive. These are often the reasons behind their will of getting tattooed. 

Right after that, through the years, people claimed that having a tattoo makes them feel more rebellious, which is not that unexpected since society also perceives people with (a lot) tattoos more rebellious as well.

Get a look at the table below and you’ll see another feelings that having at least one tattoo over the body makes people feel. The most common feelings are spiritual, intelligent, respected, and healthy. And maybe the feeling that is very rare is feeling employable. So, a very few people claimed that having tattoos (visible tattoos) make them feel more employable. That’s probably because of the (miss)perception of the society when it comes to people with tattoos. Like it or not, part of the society still has some stereotypes and prejudices when it comes to tattoo art.

How having a tattoo makes me feel? (as per TheHarrisPoll)

Tattoo discrimination… It’s still there

Yup, there it is… social discrimination for tattoos. We are living in 2021 but out there are still people who discriminate on many basis. And having tattoos is one of them.

So, when people were asked to complete the sentence: “I find tattooed people more…” here’s what they said: 

Compared to people without tattoos, I think people with tattoos are…? (as per TheHarrisPoll)

And when they had to rank them with “less” or “more” here’s what they got us:

Compared to people without tattoos, I think people with tattoos are…? More/Less (as per TheHarrisPoll)                                                     

And what about getting a job? Do you think that people who have tattoos, especially the ones that have many visible tattoos can get a job on the same conditions as the people who don’t have tattoos?

To get these answers you can check the table below. People were asked how comfortable they feel if people with tattoos serve them in different professions. Their answers are below. So, they ranked their comfortability on a scale from 1 to 5, with 5 being extremely comfortable and 1 being not at all comfortable.

Of those who answered as they feel extremely comfortable, Millennials and Gen Xers are the ones that have less prejudices about this topic. 

On the other hand, those who don’t feel comfortable at all are mostly Baby Boomers and Mature people. This is not a surprise since we all know that older people tend to be more conservative.

Now let’s see these metrics but from a different point of view. These same people answered about how they feel if someone with tattoos interacts and serves their children in different profession. They also had to rank it on a scale from 1 to 5. And as we might not expected but most of the parents are feeling extremely comfortable if their kid’s coach or teacher has tattoos.

And another stats show that mothers are more conservative about this question. Also, when we group them by age, parents above 45 years are less comfortable with this.

Would you allow your kid to get a tattoo?

Parents who allow their kids to get a tattoo are cool parents, right?

That’s what children think. Let’s check out what parents think about that. In this table we’ll find data about at what age would parents allow their children to get a tattoo. But to get a full picture we compared that data with allowing to get pierced ears and getting pierces on their faces or bodies.

And of course, we are not surprised to know that over 80% of the parents would NEVER EVER allow their kids to do such things. But what we are surprised by is that parents feel more comfortable with their kids getting a tattoo than piercing their faces or bodies. Told ya, tattoos are really cool.

Conclusion

We went through the most common questions about tattoos and how different people feel about them. We hope that you have a more clear picture of where the tattoo art stands in the modern society.

And what about you? How do you feel about tattoos?