11/09/2026
I fu***ng love being a tattoo artist. I’m grateful that I get to make a living creating art, meeting people and doing something that genuinely means something to me.
But I don’t think people realise how mentally exhausting this job can be.
You’re expected to turn up every day and perform at an incredibly high level. Not just do your job — create something permanent on another human being’s body. Something they might carry for the rest of their life.
You can be tired, stressed, ill, dealing with s**t at home or mentally running on empty, but when that client sits in your chair, you still have to perform.
There’s no “off day” when someone has trusted you with their skin.
Then there’s the constant scrutiny.
Your work gets photographed, zoomed in on, posted online, compared, criticised and judged by other artists and by people who have never tattooed in their lives.
Sometimes constructive criticism is valuable. That’s part of being an artist.
But social media has also created this weird environment where thousands of people can form an opinion about your work, your personality, your intentions and sometimes your entire character from a 30-second video.
They don’t see the human being behind it.
They don’t see the years spent learning.
The mistakes.
The pressure.
The late nights.
The anxiety about whether a piece will heal perfectly.
The constant obsession with getting better.
The bills.
The rent.
The equipment.
The insurance.
The cancellations.
The clients who don’t turn up.
The messages at midnight.
The admin.
The social media.
The expectation that you somehow also need to be a photographer, videographer, marketer, designer, accountant, therapist and business owner while still finding enough creative energy to tattoo for six or seven hours.
And being self-employed means there isn’t really such a thing as being sick.
If I don’t work, I don’t get paid.
Sometimes taking a day off because you’re mentally or physically exhausted just creates another thing to worry about because the bills don’t take a day off with you.
Then you have the responsibility of knowing that your decisions are permanent.
A bad day in a lot of jobs gets forgotten.
A bad day tattooing can be walking around on somebody for the next 40 years.
That pressure is difficult to explain unless you’ve experienced it.
And underneath all of that, you’re still an artist.
Which means you naturally give a s**t about what you create.
You want people to love it.
You want to be proud of it.
You want to improve.
So criticism can hit harder than people realise because you’ve often poured hours of concentration, experience and a piece of yourself into what somebody is casually ripping apart from their phone.
None of this means I hate tattooing.
Quite the opposite.
I genuinely love what I do.
But gratitude and struggle can exist at the same time.
I think sometimes people look at tattoo artists and see someone drawing cool pictures all day, having a laugh and getting paid well for it.
They don’t see the psychological weight that can come with trying to be consistently creative, technically excellent, financially stable, publicly visible and emotionally available every single day.
And sometimes…
It’s just fu***ng hard.
So if you know a tattoo artist who occasionally disappears, goes quiet, looks exhausted or needs some space from the internet…
There’s probably a lot more happening behind the scenes than you realise.
We’re artists.
But we’re human first.
