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Jelly Roll Reminds Young People That Tattoos Aren’t Something To Be Cheap About: “Some Wisdom That Nobody Gave Me”
That’s a lot of tattoos to wish you never got…
A while back, Jelly Roll appeared on The Howard Stern show, where Stern asked him about his tattoos and how he’d heard Jelly say he wished he’d never gotten 98% of them. Jelly has tattoos on his face, and covering his arms and most of his body, including one that says “Music Man” on his forehead, and a cross on his cheek under his eye.
He previously sat down with GQ to give fans some colorful insight into his ink and how it got there. But he starts off by warning that he is not a fan of much of the artwork on his body today.
“I regret 98% of these tattoos. 97%… almost all of them. Like core philosophies I rooted my life in when I was 17…now I’m 40. I’m like, ‘What the **** was I thinking?’”
Jelly Roll first pointed out the “baby smoking a blunt” as one that was “too much”:
“Maybe the baby smoking a blunt was a little bit much.”
While he still has that tattoo, he notes that many of his tattoos are coverups, including the huge Batman Building tattoo on the back of his neck from the Nashville skyline. That coverup hides a “no ragrets” moment.
“I had ‘Surviving the struggle,’ but we had forgot to put the ‘T’ so it, so it said ‘Surviving the sruggle.’”
Jelly Roll started getting tattooed at the age of 14, with his first time in the chair getting a remembrance piece in honor of a woman in his childhood neighborhood after she passed. His most meaningful tattoo is the larger cross on his face.
“As cliche as it is, is probably the big cross. It was symbolic of change in me. It was symbolic of a new beginning, understanding that I needed to bear my own cross. I need to carry my own cross as the Good Book says, so that was kind of a constant reminder.”
You can watch more about it here:
But as a much older, more mature adult now, he realizes that, at the very least, he should’ve paid for better artists to tattoo him, because there are some he got by doing things like trading a sack of “bad weed” for it, and it came out looking like a “quarter sack of bad weed tattoo”:
“That’s probably one of the few I’d keep. I love my cross, I love my slash… so listen to me, if you’re out there listening to this this morning and you’re under the age of 25 and you’re considering getting tattoos, I’d like to give you some wisdom that nobody gave me. We will spend $300 on a pair of shoes that will go bad in six months, or we’ll lose them. But as soon as a motherf****** wants $400 an hour to tattoo you, we’re out. Thousand dollars an hour? No way. You know what I mean?
I have a tattoo on my arm that I gave somebody like a quarter sack of bad weed for, and it looks like a quarter sack of bad weed tattoo. They look decent, cause they’re all grouped together, so you’re like, they don’t look horrible Jelly. It’s like, until you dissect them and zoom in, you’re like, these suck bad. It’s just bad art. There’s just no other way to say it.”
I think it’s certainly good advice for young people, but I can’t imagine disliking a majority of the tattoos that cover your body and have become part of his signature look… the video of him talking about it has gone viral again after the Stern Show shared a clip over the weekend, and you can watch it here:
@howardsternshow Jelly Roll Points Out the Tattoos He Regrets Getting (2024) #SternShow #howardstern #thehowardsternshow #howardsternshow #fypage #fy #jellyroll #tattoo #tattoos @Jelly Roll ♬ original sound – The Howard Stern Show
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