What Does Getting a Tattoo Feel Like?
Key takeaways:
The feeling of getting a tattoo depends on a lot of factors — including the location of the tattoo and your pain tolerance.
Find a tattoo artist with a light hand, which will decrease the pain.
The pain is worth it for people who love getting tattoos.
At a tattoo studio one recent evening in Lexington, Kentucky, Alivia Hollquist watched as a tattoo artist touched up a tattoo just above her right knee.
Nineteen-year-old Alivia was getting her fourth tattoo — this one marking the birth years of her mother, her father, and herself in red ink.
While Alivia says she doesn’t like to even get a shot when she goes to the doctor, she doesn’t mind the pain of getting a tattoo.
“I guess ’cause it’s worth it,” she says. “It’s worth the pain.”
One Prescription + One Pump + Once a Day
Introducing CABTREO: the treatment that has clindamycin phosphate, adapalene, and benzoyl peroxide all in one topical application. Now cash pay patients pay no more than $100 using GoodRx.
How does it feel? It depends
To give a tattoo, a tattoo artist — such as Olivia Beach, who runs Lunar Studios Art & Tattoo in Lexington — uses a needle to insert ink into the dermis, the middle layer below the surface layer of the skin.
Getting a tattoo involves risks, such as the chance of getting an infection or having an allergic reaction. A new tattoo is actually a wound that needs time and care to heal properly.
The consensus on how it feels to get a tattoo? Well, it varies.
It depends not only on the person being tattooed and their pain tolerance, but also where on the body the tattoo is located and who the tattoo artist is.
A lot of Olivia’s customers simply put in headphones, listen to music, and chill while she tattoos them, she says. Some even fall asleep. Others react to the pain, which is challenging for a tattoo artist, when their canvas is jerking around.
Olivia is 25 years old and has 11 tattoos. Usually, the pain isn’t bad, she says. The exception is the butterfly on her right leg, just below her knee. Because there isn’t much fat to separate the bone from the skin, the shin is a painful place to get tattooed. On a scale of 1 to 10, Olivia says that pain was a 12.
It’s also more painful for Olivia to tattoo herself than have someone else give her a tattoo. When someone else does it, she says, she can zone out and ignore the pain. But when she tattoos herself — like the “GRL PWR” in overlapping hearts just above her right knee — she’s more aware of the pain.
Read more like this
Explore these related articles, suggested for readers like you.
For Alivia, who had the finishing touches on the birth years tattoo, the pain is fleeting.
Getting a tattoo feels “like a shot, over and over again,” she says.
But she says it’s not that bad. She’s already planning her fifth tattoo.
A light hand is important
For Trinity Rhodes, the pain of getting a tattoo depends on the touch of the tattoo artist.
The scorpion tattoo on her left forearm left her gritting her teeth, she says, because that artist did it with a heavy hand.
In contrast, she says, the luna moth butterfly on her upper right arm didn’t hurt as much. That’s because Olivia did it with a light touch, Trinity says. As Olivia touched up the lines of the butterfly, Trinity laid on her stomach, looking comfortable enough to fall asleep.
Trinity and Olivia are both cat owners who describe getting a tattoo in feline-related terms.
“The most common answer is that it feels like a cat scratch on a really bad sunburn,” Olivia says.
And for Trinity: “Getting a tattoo feels like when you pet a cat’s belly, and the cat grabs your hands and kicks, scratching you with its claws,” she says. “It’s not aggressive. But it does hurt, at least a little.”
Sitting still is the hardest part
Lying facedown on the tattoo bed, Ana Maldonado kicked her feet gently in the air. She was getting a touch-up on a cluster of colorful flowers tattooed on her right shoulder.
When she originally got the tattoo 2 years ago, the artist was light-handed enough that Ana slept through it, she says. But the colors faded, bringing her to Olivia’s studio.
“I’m just going to bring it back to life,” Olivia says.
For Ana, the hardest part of getting a tattoo is sitting still for so long, which is why she fidgeted a little. She sometimes also feels phantom pain in parts of her body that aren’t being tattooed.
Ana compared the pain levels for her different tattoos, which depended primarily on location. Her wrist was a 1 on a scale of 1 to 10; she says she barely felt it. Her shoulder was a 4 or 5. “It hurts, but it’s tolerable,” she says. Her hip was by far the worst — she says it was an 8, but that was her answer while “trying to be brave.”
All in all, the pain isn’t bad, she says, especially once your skin goes numb.
“Paper cuts are worse,” she says.
What does the doctor say?
Patricia Pinto-Garcia, MD, MPH
Medical Editor
The experience of getting a tattoo differs from person to person. Everyone has different perceptions of pain because each person develops unique brain pathways that control the pain experience. Depending on your own brain pathway, you can experience pain more intensely.
Then, there’s the location of the tattoo. Some parts of the body are more sensitive to pain than others — whether it’s because there’s more nerve endings (like in your face) or a smaller fat pad to provide cushioning.
Fear and anxiety can heighten your pain perception. So if you have needle fear or are just nervous about getting a tattoo, the experience can be more painful.
The way you get a tattoo can play a role as well. A trained and skilled tattoo artist will use techniques to minimize trauma to the skin. This not only makes getting a tattoo easier, but it also helps with the healing process.
If you’re interested in getting a tattoo but have needle fear or are worried about your pain tolerance, there are things that can make the experience easier. You can use over-the-counter and prescription numbing creams before you get your tattoo. You can also try acetaminophen or ibuprofen afterward to help with pain.
Why trust our experts?
