Tattoo artists have, by and large, seen it all. That includes a whole host of designs so popular they never want to see them again, like lions, clocks, and roses, as well as some pretty cringeworthy ink mistakes. In a recent video on the Inked channel, tattooists reveal the kind of work that they now always say no to, and the reasons why.
Bradley Silver recalls one client who, inspired by something he’d seen on a porn performer, wanted a star tattooed around his butthole. “And I said, man I do not want to do that—but I will, for $5,000,” he laughs.
Elsewhere, tattooists have been burned by experiences where the subject matter of the tattoo was rendered irrelevant by the end of the session.
“Couples names. I will never do that again,” says Kat. “The boyfriend got the tattoo really big on his arm, then it was the girl’s turn and she wanted it on her finger, and they were arguing and he said ‘you should get it bigger because I just got mine big,’ and she said ‘fuck you, no,’ and she’s whispering to me telling me to do it lightly because they’re breaking up after the session… He came back the next week to get it covered.”
Other artists will turn down work that’s unoriginal and just involves copying something that’s already out there. “I’m kind of open,” says Robby Latos. “Just as long as you let me have fun with it, and kind of create my own… on a scale of 1 to 10, how much are you willing to let me run and have my freedom, and I accept the 10s. If it’s an 8, then you don’t trust me, so find someone you trust.”
But there’s one area where every artist in the video says they draw a hard line: any artwork that includes hate speech or white supremacist iconography.
“I refuse to do racial tattoos. I don’t fuck with that shit at all,” says Thom Bulman. “One time, I had just tattooed a darker-skinned guy, and this white guy came in and, right in front of the guy and his kids, said he wanted ‘white power’ tattooed across his chest. I said ‘are you fucking kidding?'”
“Almost no tattoo artist is going to want to tattoo a swastika,” says Joey Perez.
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