eli5 if tattoo artists numb the area why do people still warn you about how painful the tattoo will be?
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The artist who did my tattoo didn’t offer me any numbing, and in fact warned me against taking painkillers because aspirin thins the blood and when you’ve got tiny needles going into your skin multiple times, you want the (minor) bleeding to stop as soon as possible. Plus what everyone else said about not wanting to be responsible for allergic reactions, plus if you can feel it, you can feel if something is going wrong and get them to stop. I have a mole on my elbow that FUCKING HURTS if I accidentally scratch it, and I don’t want issues with that if I get a tattoo that goes past my elbow.
So the pain I felt was two-fold. The first was the needles going in, the second was the healing process. After a tattoo is done, you’re basically left with an open wound that you need to keep clean and let heal.
I only have one on my upper arm (but I want to get plenty more on various parts of my body), but mine wasn’t really that painful. It just felt like someone was scratching at a sunburn, and after a few hours I found myself wanting more, plus tuning out the pain (the artist has a TV mounted near the chair and we were watching episodes of Trailer Park Boys and Archer and shit while he was doing it.
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