When getting a tattoo, every part of the body will react differently. Some parts will feel like someone is poking you, and others will feel like someone is killing you. I haven’t gotten a tattoo in every place possible, but I have gotten them in a few different places. I recently got a tattoo on the lower part of my calf, and I am being honest when I say it is a kind of pain I have never felt before. It made me think about the different kinds of pain when getting a tattoo.
I also have two wrist tattoos, one on each wrist. The wrist is a delicate part of the body, as it has bones on either side and one major vein in the middle of it. You would expect it to hurt, right? Fun fact, the wrist hurt the least out of all the tattoos I have. The difference between my left and my right wrist, however, is that my left hurt more than my right. A big difference was the amount of detail in each tattoo. With my tattoo on the left, there was some shading, which means there were more needles involved than the standard outlining needle, which is about three to five needles. The shading was done mainly where the vein lies on the wrist, which is in the center of the arm. My other wrist, however, was all outlining. So, because there was a small amount of needles and nothing more, it wasn’t as painful. Did it hurt, though? Of course it did—there are needles going in and out of my wrist. In any case, my wrists hurt the least.
The next tattoo I got was on my upper arm, in the bicep area. This tattoo hurt like a bitch. There was a lot more detail in this tattoo as well, which probably made it hurt more. There is dot work, which meant my tattoo artist took a single needle and kept poking at my arm. Half the time, I couldn’t feel him doing it; even when I did feel it, it wasn’t so bad. But, what mostly made this tattoo hurt was a part that needed to be filled in that covered a good amount of surface area. This meant that he had to use a big shading needle, meaning there were 15-25 needles going in and out of my arm at an alarmingly fast rate. It was a big surface area to cover. This hurt the most out of all the parts of that tattoo. Because of the placement and the amount of detail, this is second on the list of painful tattoos for me.
The last and most recent tattoo I have is my first color tattoo. I’ve heard a lot of things about how color hurts more than black and white. I don’t believe this to be true, since there is black in my tattoo. But, the amount of pain I felt while getting this was more than I imagined. This tattoo is on the side of my leg, right next to the ankle. Yes, there is a lot of muscle on the side of your leg, but because it was right next to the ankle, there was a lot of bone contact. Getting a tattoo on a bone is one of the worst pains you can feel. So, because of the placement of this one, it makes it the most painful tattoo I’ve ever gotten.
Obviously, this is just my experience. Everyone has different pain tolerances so not every experience will be the same. If you are getting a tattoo, just be careful where you place it, and make sure you are ready to handle any pain!