Tattoo artists on the worst tattoos they've ever done

People work ultra hard to design their tattoos to be meaningful symbols of themselves, their beliefs, their passions.

Y’know, like The Bachelor‘s bacon girl’s AH-MAZE ankle tattoo.

Such deep. Very meaning. Picture via Ten.

As bacon girl demonstrates, it's got to be something that'll resonate with you when you're 80. After all, it's pretty permanent.

So you've got to pity people who go through ink regret. (Like this girl who recently was rejected from two dream jobs for her ink the size of a 10 cent coin.)

But what's worse than ink regret? When your tattoo artist wishes they never even gave you the tatt in the first place.

Tattoo artists were asked on Reddit to spill the worst ink they'd ever given a client. Here are our favourite answers.

The wrong birthday.

"A guy i know has a tattoo of Roman numerals with his date of birth running down his forearm. The problem is - he wasn't old enough to get one at the time so lied on the form he had to fill out, and as a result, he now has a tattoo with the WRONG date of birth on his arm!"

The massive cover up.

"I did a cover up that I wasn't proud of, but that's what the client wanted. A couple came in to the shop asking for a cover up of an ex bf. She showed me and surely enough, a big guy's name on her side hip. The good part was it was done in a light blue ink, easy to cover. I already started getting ideas in my head of what to cover it with. Guy steps in and says, "No. We just want a star over it". The name was about 5-6 inches long and I explained that a star that big would have to be, at least... 8inches big to fully cover the name. Both said yes to this. My boss walks over and gets on my ass for not suggesting something else, but I explained to him that that's what they wanted. Both looked at him and nodded. By the time it was done, this small, petite girl had a blue star covering her entire hip area. It looked cheap, tacky, ghetto mad, just stupid. After that, I refused to do cover ups if the client doesn't listen to reason."

The Pokemon fanatic.

"My sister in law just put a pokemon valor tattoo on someone's neck."

via GIPHY

The dad joke.

My buddy has tear drops on the sides of his middle fingers. Anytime someone complains to him he puts them up to his eyes and makes a pouty face.

The impossible naughts and crosses.

"Not a tattoo artist, but a friend has a naughts and crosses game tattooed on his leg, however the resulting combination of Xs and Os is impossible. I give him shit for it every time he wears shorts. There are 3 Xs which are forming a winning diagonal line, and 4 Os scattered elsewhere. The game should have ended at the third X, meaning there is no way a 4th O should have been played."

The soulmate (I hope).

A biker girl that got "Property of (guy's name)" on her lower back. Talking huge though, literally half her back. Same deal as the last one. Might as well get it done right and might as well be the one that makes the money. Apparently her and the guy had only been dating for two months, and she had just had a baby with another guy. Even asked her when the guy went outside to smoke if she was sure, and that she could back out if she wanted to and made sure she wasn't getting pressured into it. She was just genuinely down as f--k for the guy, absolutely stoked to get that tattoo. Hope they're still together cause there's no way in f--k that giant tattoo is getting covered."

Would you ever get this? Post continues after video...

The payback tatt.

I do custom script, there's this couple that comes in, trashy tattoos etc. She tells me that he's going away to prison in a few weeks and he wants to get her name and she'll get his name right after. I insist this isn't the best idea, try to convince them otherwise, they don't listen.

So I do it because rent doesn't pay itself and I got bad habits to maintain. He goes first. After getting her name tattooed across his stomach she spits in his face, says: "Now you understand how shitty it felt when you slept withinsert name here, you thought I'd never find out you fucking piece of shit?!" And then stormed out the shop, never getting hers...

Now I'm not a 100% sure here because I'm not very good with these things but I think they had problems... cough

The bullseyes.

"A girl wanted me to make her nipples in to targets, black and red circles around them. Yeah, not proud of that one."

The dragon-unicorn hug.

"A dragon and a unicorn. Spooning. Dragon was big spoon. They were floating on a cloud. It was a sizable shoulder piece."

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Picture via Imgur. [/IMG_CAPTION]

The Drake challenge

When I was an apprentice we had a "DJ" that performs at a lot of local clubs call our studio just as I was walking out the door, my ears perked up immediately as I gathered that much from our receptionist on the phone and took the call. Obviously with intention of getting a good bit of exposure amongst the club scene once he posts on his social media. He wanted a messy looking smiley face (like his own kind of blink 182 kind of thing) normally I'd arrange a consult and make a booking but he was desperate to have it right there and then no matter the cost. I told him to come straight down and I'll have a couple designs made up for him once he gets here. 30 minutes later he comes flying through the door and runs to my desk, he's covered in green dye and different colors from powder bombs and confessed he doesn't actually want the smiley face on his hip but "I DID IT FOR THE SNAPCHAT" in "that font from the Drake cover". Looking at his arms he was already covered in crap from backyard scratchers and it helped me justify doing it. While doing the tattoo he explained to me he was getting it for a competition a club was doing amongst djs to see who could promote the clubs new name change on social media the best and win a contract to get to perform there for a period of time. His first antic was sculling 3 litres of milk with green dye in it until he threw up, second was just a powder bomb war and lastly wanted to go to the extreme of getting the tattoo. I finished the piece and kindly asked him if he could not promote myself or the studio for obvious reasons. He was over the moon and loved it, paid the agreed amount and ran back out to see what he could do next. What I was unaware of was the girl that came in with him that I thought was his gf actually worked for this club and was snapchatting the whole thing through the businesses account.

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Tattoo artists are sharing the worst tattoos they've ever had to give clients.

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