The 7 Most Regrettable Tattoos Ever Received
As an online comedy writer, or humorist, if you will, I'm expected to be as pale and glossy as an English sausage. Truth be known, I'm a bit of an ink aficionado and have a number of tattoos, all of which have deep, personal, and serious meaning. Just kidding, they're mostly goofy tattoos that I found amusing for one reason or another. I'd show you pictures, but this article isn't about me, and I'll thank you not to meddle in my affairs.
As it happens, I was watching a show called Tattoo Nightmares, which is apparently broadcast 10 hours a day on Spike TV. The show focuses on people who got a tattoo they regret and how it gets covered up with a great new tattoo. And it made me think, these aren't nightmares. They're just shitty tattoos getting fixed. There are way more nightmarish stories about tattoos out there. Like these!
Prank Tattoo
A good rule of thumb is, if you get into an argument with a guy who isn't an actual tattoo artist, just a guy with a tattoo gun, and then he offers to tattoo you, don't do it. It will turn out badly. In this case, the customer in question wanted a tattoo of a yin-yang symbol with some dragons around it, your typical kind of cheeseball tattoo that people might get on the spur of the moment in a dude's kitchen. If he were a girl, it would be a butterfly in the small of her back, or maybe some koi, because chicks dig koi. What he got instead was a giant cock. Like a full on 15-inch chubby right on his back, with big round balls to complete the ensemble. And to add further insult to injury, it's not even well done.
Would a well-done dick ameliorate the injustice of having a dick on your back? Hard to say, but when I read this story, I was actually expecting it to be a real veiny, meaty dong of a thing, like a majestic horse wang, all bulgy and obscene, maybe listing to one side under its own weight. Instead it's a half-assed line drawing that looks like a drunk with a Sharpie hastily scrawled it on a bathroom wall.
It says "I luv cock" under it. Oh man. I admit, I laughed when I saw that, but I can appreciate that, to the dude in question, this was probably not funny at all. Even a day later he probably didn't laugh at this.
Lucky for Yin Wang, a credible artist offered to give him a coverup tattoo so he doesn't have to pay out tons to have the tattoo removed or deal with the potential scarring, plus he'll still get a sweet tattoo out of the deal. So in the end it was probably not worth it still, but it could have been worse.
Vengeance Tattoo
The idea of giving someone a tattoo as a prank or for revenge seems like a hilarious plan if you literally stop thinking about it right there and then switch you brain off or go watch Adventure Time or something. Those incapable of doing that might stop to wonder how you could tattoo a person against their will, given how still you need to sit to get the job done and the fact that an artist is literally tethered in place by the equipment. But just like all male dinosaurs throwing caution to the wind on Isla Sorna and making sweet dino love to procreate, life finds a way!
In this case, a man and his tattoo artist bound and tied down the man's wife, which still probably made for some terrible tattooing, before subjecting her to a vengeance tattoo because the man suspected her of cheating on him. What did they tattoo on her? We don't know, but it covered her arms, stomach, and breasts, so it must have taken a while and was probably awful in numerous ways.
As a happy ending to the story, the artist was sentenced to two years in prison for his part in the dipshittery, while the husband got a longer sentence. Plus, since this happened in Singapore, he was also caned. Literally caned. With a cane!
Tattoo Bullies
Bullying was a lot different when I was your age. Sit here a moment, I need to have my prostate removed and drink an Ensure. Back in the day, bullying was honest work. You didn't like a kid, so you called him fat or poor or gay, and then maybe you beat the ever-loving shit out of him every day until he grew up bitter and resentful and started writing comedy articles. But nowadays bullying is a whole ordeal.
Aside from the fact that schools and special interest groups have to pretend like they care about bullying now, bullies themselves are getting lost in the myriad ways they can make someone's life miserable. Should they stalk you on Facebook? Text you incessantly, because you have to have a phone when you're 12? Push you into a dumpster behind Golden Corral? The choices are endless. And now it seems like tattooing kids is also an option.
A high school boy was threatened with some severe beatings by older students at his high school if he didn't submit to getting tattooed. Being the kind of kid who values self-preservation, he opted for the tattoo and ended up getting a dick on his ass, because of course that's what he'd get.
The kids involved were charged with various assaults, but the victim is going to have to spend a few thousand to have the tattoo removed, barring an unusual desire to keep a forced dick tattoo on his ass for the rest of his life.
The Tattoo of Regret
There's a popular refrain the tattooed are used to hearing from those not tattooed that deals with regret. You're going to regret that when you're older! How's that going to look when you're 90? To answer that question, it's going to look exactly the same. It's a tattoo. It doesn't turn into other shit as you age. Most people who get tattoos don't plan on becoming pope or anything later in life, and even if they did, they'd be tattooed popes. What the hell point are you trying to make?
The issue of regret is potentially a valid one, although maybe not for the reason you'd think. Sure, some people get idiotic tattoos or tattoos by artists who have no business handling a tattoo gun, and those are regrettable, but other people regret tattoos because they're complete idiots. Like Aaron Evans, a man who tried to steal a police bait car in England. His ability to get away with the crime was severely limited by the fact that the car has cameras inside it and Evans has his own name and date of birth tattooed right on his neck, in case you don't want to spend a lot of time looking him up before you go and arrest him for being a moron.
This is the tattoo equivalent of leaving your wallet at the scene of a bank robbery or signing your name with the ashes of the building you just burned down. Probably the kind of thing you should plan to avoid in your quest to become a criminal mastermind.
Billboard Face
Billy Gibby is famous for using his body as a billboard. He is covered in sponsored tattoos, including numerous ones on his face, for such visionary websites as minkaxxx.com, hiphopbling.com, libertytaxservice.com, and savemartha.com. Many of the sites no longer exist, and as he grows older, he's having to deal with the unfortunate knowledge that being covered in numerous porn URLs isn't the splendid dream us common folk might think it is.
There was a time, when the Internet was young, that Billy could charge up to $1,000 to get a logo tattooed on his body. But like all tired old harlots, he had to drop his prices, and eventually he was shilling flesh for a meager $75 a shot. These days Gibby says he was actually undiagnosed as bipolar, a condition that contributed to him thinking any of this was a good idea. Probably any permanent changes you make to your body as the result of an undiagnosed medical condition are not good ideas and are things you will later regret.
Now that he's medicated, he has 20 awful as shit tattoos he wants to get rid of and not a lot of means to do it, since he's completely unemployable, what with porn website names plastered across his noggin. So he's auctioning off more space on the rest of his body for more reputable companies to help finance the removal of his terrible ones. Good luck, Gibby!
Cattooing
Russia is a bit of a strange place these days. Their leader is constantly shirtless and hugging animals, everyone has dashcams, and every so often giant meteors rain down from the sky in a blaze of glory. Plus all the Russian mob stuff and the dancing bears. What's the deal with that?
Another Russian trend that may be hard to wrap your head around is tattooing cats. Because it involves tattooing a cat. Who the hell does that? Russians!
To clarify, this isn't hip Internet slang or Russian innuendo. They literally take a cat of the hairless variety, sedate it, and then tattoo it. Timur Rimut, whose last name is an anagram of his first and therefore perhaps not a real name at all, posted a video of a procedure in which he gave his cat a tattoo that matches his own. They have matching tattoos. Take a moment to bask in that. He also has the cat's portrait tattooed on himself.
Other Russian cats have appeared online bearing awesome tattoos like the sarcophagus of King Tut, and one little scamp has a full-body spread going on. Classy.
Why tattoo a cat, you ask? Ha ha ha.
(Potential) Death by Tattoo
Bali is one of the world's leading sex tourism destinations thanks to the fact that it has equal appeal for both men and women. While many destinations cater to a male crowd and their deviant urges, Bali has a booming industry of something called Kuta cowboys, local males who are basically gigolos for the pleasure of female tourists. It's fascinating, really. Has nothing to do with this entry other than the fact that you can apparently get HIV from both the cowboys and the tattooists in Bali.
A tourist from Western Australia contracted HIV after getting tattooed in Bali back at the ass end of 2011. The ultimate tattoo nightmare is summed up in that quick and horrible side effect -- if a tattoo artist is too stupid or lazy to follow basic tattooing rules, including sanitation and using clean equipment, then a tattoo gun basically becomes a drooling back-alley penis, shooting infection all up in your body 50 times a second, giving you anything from HIV to hepatitis to serious infections, including necrotizing fasciitis, tetanus, and tuberculosis. If there's something you don't want to have, a filthy-ass tattoo needle or ink could give it to you. Imagine how awful you'd feel if you had the stupid drunken whim to get "YOLO" tattooed on the back of your neck and it gave you polio. God, that's humiliating.
That said, tattoo infections are pretty rare -- they number around 50 a year, and most of those are simple skin infections that clear up quickly. In fact, the CDC hasn't logged any cases of HIV infection from tattoos in the U.S. at all. But still, if you're heading to Bali or Bangkok or some other foreign port because you maybe want to see the local wildlife and/or hump the locals, don't get tattooed while you're there. Consider this is a PSA.
