Risks of blackout tattoos as Machine Gun Kelly reveals horrifying side effects he experienced
Kit Roberts
Featured Image Credit: Instagram/machinegunkelly
Experts have warned about the risks of blackout tattoos as Machine Gun Kelly opens up about his own experience with the style.
Tattoos can be a beautiful art form and means of self-expression, and while a regular tattoo sees the artist drawing a design with your skin tone as the backdrop, blackout tattoos take a different approach to this.
In a blackout tattoo, the artist can reverse this idea, with the tattoo ink taking up most of the space on your skin, sometimes leaving gaps in the ink to form a design.
Alternatively, some people get the blackout tattoos to cover up entire sections of their body, such as arm or shoulder, in ink, effectively meaning the entire layer of skin is tattooed, not just a small section.
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The style is becoming increasingly trendy on social media, though they can can also take on a specific meaning, for example, someone who has self-harmed while struggling with their mental health might get a blackout tattoo to make the scars less visible.
A doctor has warned about the potential health risks of this style of tattooing.
Will Kirby, M.D. is the medical director of a facility in New York City which specializes in tattoo removal.
He explained that it's not necessarily the amount of ink in this style which is the issue, but the type of ink.
“It’s not only the quantity of ink but the constituents of the ink injected,” he told Women's Health. “These days artists frequently mix ink together, and an all-black tattoo, which clinically appears to be composed of just carbon-based ink, may actually be an amalgamation of different inks.”
Nonetheless, he added that a design which requires more ink, with a blackout tattoo needing the most of any style, will make this worse.
“While these ingredients in any amount are worrisome, there is a valid argument for problems being dose dependent—meaning the higher volume of ink you have in your body, the more likely you are to suffer negative consequences from it," he said.
Machine Gun Kelly is among those to have the style, and opened up about his own experiences.
The musician said that after getting a blackout tattoo on large parts of his torso, arms, and shoulders, he started to become sick.
"After the first week, we hit my lymph nodes around my armpits and shoulders, and I got really sick," he said. "My skin was turning yellow. I wasn’t able to sleep. I stopped being able to move certain parts of my upper body."