My Own Tattoo Mistakes (And What They Taught Me)

One day, some time in my mid twenties, I began to catch a different view of myself in the mirrors that I walked past or the photos I was in. It was the same image, same reflection, but time, context, and maturity began to tell me a different story than the me I saw looking back. The same tattoos that I once craved so urgently slowly began to look like a version of myself that didn’t feel like who I was becoming. These are my tattoo regret lessons and mistakes — shared honestly, because I think they're worth examining.

I began to second-guess outfits, social situations, subtly dreading conversations about my tattoos and what they mean. If a camera was out, let me turn to my other side so my tattoo wasn’t in the photo. If someone asked what they meant, I would casually dismiss, “let’s not linger here long.” “This isn’t the version of me that I want for my first impression.” It wasn’t full-on shame, but it certainly wasn’t pride. My tattoos weren’t bad, they weren’t trashy, but they didn’t represent the me I expected to see looking back. And it certainly wasn’t the relationship to being tattooed that I’d always wanted.

It was always my goal to be tattooed. For my first few years collecting, it was a pure practice of creative autonomy: just get more. Hopefully they mean something, but ultimately, just be tattooed.

Comparatively, my relationship to regret is mild. Had I had the money for more tattoos, more tattoos I would have had. The truth is, for a tattoo artist who’s been surrounded by tattoos for a decade, I don't have a lot of tattoos. But the integration of the tattoos I did have wasn't the empowering and self-affirming experience that I’d hoped. It wasn’t until I entered the tattoo industry that I really began to see my tattoo journey for what it was: thematically, a reactive rush.

Even being around more tattoos than ever before, marrying a tattoo artist, learning to tattoo, I realized that I didn’t have the best track record. Of the tattoos I’d collected, only one of them (surprisingly, my very first) I still agreed with. I realized I needed to pause, even if I wanted more, and figure out how I had gone wrong.

I got lucky that my husband is a tattoo artist, and we started the large project of covering my biggest piece and adding on to it. This was a piece that, similar to my very first tattoo, finally felt right. To look down at my arm and see a tattoo that felt like me, a less urgent, and more embodied and examined version of me, was a relief to say the least.

To understand how I got there, it helps to start where I actually got it right.

I got my first tattoo on my 18th birthday, and ironically, it was a birthday present baked in cliches. It’s the quote “this too shall pass” in the most generic loose Pinterest cursive. I started planning out my future tattoos with such certainty around 15-16, desperate to crystallize strong emotions and experiences and passing trends in ink. Some of the tattoos I felt so certain I’d still want by the time my 18th birthday countdown app expired (yes, I really had one of those for over 2 years) felt so laughingly foreign by the time I was legally able to schedule my first appointment. Needless to say, it was top of mind for years.

I took the time to consider the weight of this first decision, even if it was against my will, and landed in a place that felt safe. I used to tell myself and my friends that “this too shall pass” felt “eternally applicable”. And me at 18, was right. Although, like most tattoos you live with for years with contentment, I often don’t think about it, but when I do, it gives me the reminder that I somehow had the foresight to know I’d still need. Now that I’ve done more work to examine the psychological process that is collecting tattoos, i fully understand what went so right with this tattoo.

By default, this piece was scrupulously considered. That doesn’t mean that this is a prerequisite, but I had and took the time to ask myself, round and round, if my future self would still love this piece, something I stopped doing completely for my subsequent tattoos. What I did accidentally at the time was selected a symbol that was tremendously elastic: it related to the struggles I was experiencing at the time, years after, now, and inevitably years in the future. Even as the years, the stories, and my sense of self shift, I managed to find a symbol that could grow with me, and grow it did.

But somewhere after that, I got excited. I let the excitement become urgency, and sometimes, a coping mechanism. I stopped asking myself the deep questions. For some tattoos, I did not extend any additional thought into the future, never once even considering that my future self would live with this tattoo forever. And while my mistakes aren’t deterministic towards anyone elses experience, they've given me a lot to ponder about the truth about tattoos: they are permanent marks on impermanent people.

You might be reading this and thinking, grow a pair, respectfully, and get over it. And I admit that I don’t have the highest temperament for perceived mistakes. I am also a person who changes quite frequently, which to me created a perfect storm for regretful tattoo decisions. I do not have the most extreme story, one of getting offensive face tattoos and trying to re-enter society, no doubt. But I do believe that my personal internal temperature has created an interesting case study in a phenomenon that I am not alone in experiencing: 1 in 4 people regret at least one of their tattoos. Mine is not an uncommon story.

As I became a tattoo artist and started seeing the process with much more frequency and from a new perspective, taking on the task of covering up tattoos, my experiences began to take form in a new light. Years of seeing the full cycle, from trigger to the tattoo’s integration, allowed me to start seeing the system more holistically, and to examine my own mistakes from a birds eye view.

Tattoo Regret Lessons and Mistakes: Where I Went Astray

Months after my first tattoo I attended a small, regional tattoo convention. I had no clear intentions of getting any tattoos. But at one point I passed by an artist who was from the same Hawaiian Island I had lived on for 2 years from 11-13, and I couldn’t pass up the excitement to collect another. As we passed by the rows of booths, I quickly did the mental calculations: what could I afford, what would i even get, and how much time do I have to decide before we doubled back around. Within 20, maybe 30 minutes if I'm being generous, I’d formulated my plan. I asked the artist on the next go around if he had time to do the Hawaiian islands, small on my upper back/ribs. And then I was sitting in the chair.

This piece felt so true to me at the time, I had lived there and had some of my best experiences there. This idea was me. It truly was an experiential tattoo, which by no means is a wrong in any sense. But what I failed to fully comprehend at the time of my rapid evaluation of this pull for a tattoo right here, right now, was the depth of the cultural nuance that existed beyond me. It was hidden enough that I didn't often have to confront the fact that it existed beyond that day.

In later years, when I would return to Hawaii, when I would better understand the cultural complexity of an outsider claiming a sense of ownership over land that was historically oppressed, I would develop a new relationship to this tattoo. A tattoo that marked a true time for me, but marked a much bigger conversation that I was now carrying, by proxy, on my body. One that made me feel uneasy when staring the truth in the face. It’s deeply layered nuance like this that makes not only cultural tattoos worth considering fully, but also impulsive ones.

No experience, no tattoo, no collection style is ever “wrong”. But future-self alignment is always wise.

The importance of future-self alignment

My next tattoo was another exercise in impulsive expression of bodily autonomy. You know the show LOST? Well, I loved it. I watched every episode, every week, for it’s full 6 year airing. It was a delightfully frustrating obsession (if you don’t know, think a mystery box stranded island where the boxes of mystery are a dark bottomless pit). I had the day off on a random weekday morning, and the thought popped into my head. “I want a tattoo today”. And for whatever reason, this specific detail of LOST, recurring numbers, was it. My newest permanent addition. I made a call immediately, found the soonest walk in, and walked right in.

It was thrilling, as it always is, to make such an agentic decision. Let me whip out a crisp 100 dollar bill, and then some, and exercise my freedom of choice. Although it didn’t take long before I woke up with a slight tattoo hangover, faced with the questions about what these mysterious numbers meant on my very visible forearm. I still loved LOST, but it wasn’t until after the tattoo that I truly started modeling what it meant to have committed to this tattoo forever. I can genuinely say, again, I didn't have a modicum of consideration for what it meant past that weekday afternoon.

Reaction and Resolution

At 19, I was processing a breakup from a quite toxic and dependent relationship. The pain was fresh, and the itch to mark the moment was very real. I wanted to exercise my freedom and autonomy, and I struggled to craft my new identity independent of this deeply entrenched relationship. So I got a tattoo, naturally, to cope. It was my first big tattoo on my upper outer arm: a snake, a peony dripping honey, and the phrase in Latin, “Love is rich with both venom and honey”. I was trying so hard to move forward, to mark the closing of a chapter, but what I accidentally did was freeze the painful moment in time on my skin.

Tattoos are like relics of a previous time and self: a potent form of personal narrative transportation. It didn’t take very long before I started seeing this piece with truthful eyes: I was trying to express something with a voice that was shaking. I began to sense the inherent difference between this tattoo and my others, it was emotionally charged. For years, I circled around language to try and articulate what happened when I tattooed this feeling and this chapter on me. For a long while, I referred to it as a “bitter” tattoo. It was a disregulated state solidified in form on my body, wearing the mask and intention of being “empowering”.

Although I, now in a very peaceful and happy marriage, agree with the general intention I had behind this message, “Love is hard but it’s worth it”. But what this tattoo helped me to define was the Emotional Origin of a tattoo. The state of nervous system regulation, or lack thereof, by which a tattoo emerges from is just as worth considering as the tattoo itself. Tattoos are powerful, and they can prompt huge changes in your sense of self. But if they are an attempt to heal, collected within the painful moment itself, they can look much differently with eyes that have healed through the experience they are marking.

I believe Emotional Origin exists on a spectrum. To reduce this concept to concrete simplicity, I see two states within this spectrum that can be identified: Reaction and Resolution. My breakup tattoo was a Reaction to the painful chapter. Had I waited until I was Resolved, although I can’t say for certain, I can almost guarantee that tattoo would have been translated, and integrated, much differently.

I would later go on to add on to this piece in anticipation of building out a full sleeve, but again, I rushed. I booked based on urgency, prioritized price and speed, not alignment. The extension of this tattoo didn’t match, styles clashing, something I likely could have better predicted had I operated more intentionally rather than from urgency masked as excitement for tattoos.

These are the tattoos I covered, years later. I am grateful for the lessons I learned from them, and they brought me to a place to better understand myself. Hopefully, with my experiences and my inclination to over-weight my mistakes, I have gained valuable perspectives that I hope to guide every client who I have the honor of tattooing.

Do I hate my tattoos? No. Do I hate those versions of myself and those chapters? Absolutely not. But would I get those tattoos if I knew what I knew now? No, I would not. I used to think that my mutable personality was a liability, but I now better understand that my relationship to my style of tattoo collecting needs to be just as intentional as it is excited.

The "Future You" you don't know yet

My experiences are not deterministic of any truths, it is not prescriptive, but it has allowed me to be able to perceive tattoos for the one underlying truth that they carry. No matter the collector, their collection style, the subject matter, the depth or “just-because” nature of the tattoo: tattoos are permanent. And that means that your future self lives with them the longest.

But, how can you advocate to align with your future self if you haven’t even become them yet? This is where it gets interesting. There’s a concept within behavioral economics that always fascinated me, called Bounded Rationality. Put simply: everyone is making the best decisions at any given point in time based on the limited information that they have. The version of me who got most of my tattoos didn’t have a crystal ball, and she made the decisions that she did because that’s the scope of knowledge and experience that she had.

Can you ever possibly draft the perfect version of your future self before actively becoming them? I’m not sure that’s the case. Rather than the emphasis being one of “getting it right”, it becomes one of integrity of process. I believe there are three conditions, if met, protect the decision as much as possible within the limited window of understanding the future self.

Am I in a grounded decision state? Is this something that resonates with me or just appeals to me? And, am I willing to live with this, even if I change?

When you make the decision with care, regardless of whether or not you know who you’re becoming, your tattoos become a fully owned and embodied part of you. Even if you change. You can love them in a new light: this represents the me that did their best.

No one can tell the future, but what I do advocate for, and why I built Body as Story, is for a layer of intentional authorship. What does that mean, fanciful analogy aside? Authorship is slowing down long enough to choose something your future self can stand behind. Because your current self deserves that tattoo you want, and your future self deserves a tattoo that they still love in 10 years from now.

I never built a framework because I had it all figured out, but because I didn't, and I needed one.