People get tattoos for a wide range of reasons, but the most common ones come down to three things: commemorating someone or something important, expressing themselves through art, and simply liking how tattoos look. About 31% of adults in the United States have at least one tattoo, and among younger adults that figure climbs to roughly 50%. What drives so many people to permanently mark their skin goes deeper than aesthetics, though. Tattoos serve as identity markers, emotional outlets, social signals, and for some, tools for healing.
Self-Expression and Identity
The most straightforward reason people get tattoos is to say something about who they are. Psychologists describe tattoos as “identity claims,” which are symbolic statements meant to reinforce how you see yourself or signal to others how you want to be seen. A birthdate on your wrist reminds you of your role as a parent. A mountain range across your forearm tells strangers something about what you value. These identity claims work in two directions: inward, reinforcing your own self-concept, and outward, communicating it to the world.
Personality research supports this. People who score high in extraversion tend to have more tattoo coverage and gravitate toward designs emphasizing individuality. People high in openness to experience also tend toward larger tattoos. On the other hand, highly conscientious people tend to have less tattooed skin, and more neurotic individuals are also less likely to get heavily tattooed. None of this means tattoos predict personality in any clean way, but it does suggest that the desire for tattoos connects to broader patterns in how people engage with the world.
Remembering People and Moments
Memorial tattoos are one of the most emotionally significant categories. A study interviewing 22 people with memorial tattoos found that the core function was “embodied meaning making,” a way of processing grief by making it physically visible and permanent. Three specific themes emerged from that research: creating permanence (keeping the person’s memory literally on your body), constructing control (choosing how to respond to an uncontrollable loss), and symbolizing the bond (maintaining a felt connection to the person who died).
This isn’t limited to death. People tattoo dates of sobriety milestones, symbols of surviving illness, coordinates of places where major life events happened. The tattoo turns an invisible internal experience into something tangible you carry with you. Across cultures and throughout history, tattooing has functioned as what researchers call “a visual language of the skin whereby culture is inscribed, experienced, and preserved.”
The Body’s Response to the Process
There’s a biological dimension too. The pain of being tattooed triggers your body’s stress response, releasing dopamine and endorphins. Dopamine creates a sense of excitement or mild euphoria, while endorphins act as natural painkillers. Together, they produce a “high” during and after the session that some people find genuinely rewarding. For certain individuals, this neurochemical response becomes part of the appeal, similar to what draws people to intense physical activities. It helps explain why many people describe the experience of getting tattooed as oddly enjoyable despite the discomfort.
Boosting Body Image and Confidence
One of the more surprising findings in tattoo research is the measurable effect on self-esteem. A prospective study tracking people before and after getting tattooed found that both men and women had significantly lower appearance anxiety immediately after their session. Three weeks later, participants showed higher body appreciation, a stronger sense of uniqueness, and increased self-esteem compared to their baseline. For people who feel disconnected from or dissatisfied with their bodies, choosing a tattoo can feel like an act of ownership, transforming skin from something passive into something deliberately crafted.
Social Belonging and Group Identity
Tattoos have marked group membership for thousands of years. Warriors, soldiers, prisoners, and members of religious communities have all used tattoos to signal who they belong to. That function hasn’t disappeared. Military veterans, members of specific subcultures, sports communities, and even close friend groups use matching or themed tattoos to visibly declare their affiliations. The tattoo communicates a social message about group status or role, even when the design seems purely personal to an outsider.
For millennia, cultures worldwide have used tattoos to communicate beauty, cultural identity, social status, medicinal purpose, and even supernatural protection. Polynesian tattoo traditions, for instance, encode genealogy, social rank, and personal achievements into intricate geometric patterns. What looks decorative to an outside observer may function as a detailed personal record within the culture it comes from.
Healing and Reclaiming the Body
For survivors of trauma, tattoos can serve a specifically therapeutic role. Survivors of human trafficking, abuse, sexual exploitation, and addiction sometimes carry scars or tattoos that were forced on them or received during periods of distress. Cover-up tattoos allow people to reclaim those parts of their body. Organizations like Atlanta Redemption Ink provide tattoo cover-ups and removals specifically for this purpose, transforming marks of a traumatic past into designs the person actually chose.
Trauma-informed tattoo artists, some of whom are also trained therapists, approach these sessions with particular care, understanding that the process of being tattooed can itself be triggering for people with histories of bodily violation. The act of choosing what goes on your own skin, in a safe environment and on your own terms, becomes part of the recovery process. It’s body reclamation in the most literal sense.
When People Regret Their Tattoos
Not every tattoo decision ages well. In one cross-sectional study, 58% of tattooed participants reported regretting at least one tattoo, and 42.5% had attempted removal. The most commonly cited reasons were cultural pressure (74%), poor quality artwork (35%), and having gotten the tattoo at too young an age (33.8%). That regret rate comes from a study conducted in Saudi Arabia, where cultural attitudes toward tattoos are more conservative, so the numbers likely vary by region. Still, the pattern is consistent across research: tattoos gotten impulsively, during adolescence, or by less skilled artists are the ones people most often want gone.
The peak age for getting tattooed is 25 to 35, when incidence rates run between 11% and 18% per age group. This suggests most people aren’t getting inked on a teenage whim. The typical first tattoo happens when someone has enough life experience to choose a design with personal significance, and enough independence to follow through on it.