How much does tattooing hurt?

What does it mean to hurt? Is hurting the tearing of your skin, the literal tearing of your skin in your brain, an alarm bell in your brain telling you to fight, flee, or freeze, or a stimulus-response to what you think would happen?

Pain is an emotional and sensory experience with deep evolutionary roots. The three basic functions of animals are to find food, reproduce, and avoid harm. Thus, pain is an interaction of an animal and their environment. From a sensory perspective, pain involves various nociceptive sensory systems, such as for pressure, temperature, and noxious substances. But pain also involves dampening of nociceptive sensors, such as opioids.

“Pain” is defined by the International Association for the Study of Pain as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage.” Nociception describes the physiological activation of pain receptors and modulation of pain signals in the central and peripheral nervous systems, absent an emotional dimension. Because it’s not clear what is experienced in nonmammals, the term nociception is used to distinguish the physiological analogs of pain, since an emotional component is more difficult to detect in nonmammals, if it is in fact present.

The amount tattooing hurts depends on a person’s sensitization to tattooing pain, through both a dampening of nociception and of the emotional component—fear of pain. I have spent my career studying both dissociation and tattooing, though not necessarily in the same context.

Dissociation is the partitioning of awareness involved in everything from daydreaming to dissociative identity disorder to Pentecostal speaking in tongues, which I’ve studied. For tattooing, people often describe going into the zone, putting on headphones, talking to someone, or some other practice to distract themselves from and thus not feel pain. The pain of tattooing works through a combination of anticipation (sort of like the “white coat syndrome” of becoming nervous when a doctor tests one’s stress levels) and the physical injury to the body.

Getting a tattoo from Shane Smith at Daredevil Tattoo in NYC while chatting with my friend Purple Pam (taking photo for me).

​When I receive machine tattooing nowadays, after receiving many tattoos over the past nearly 40 years, I barely notice the sensation. However, in 2019 I received a hand-tap tattoo on my lower leg and just about jumped out of my skin from the pain. I was so startled by the sensation of how a hand-tapped tattoo is literally pounded into one’s skin that I tensed up. At one point, watching a gecko on the light overhead to try to get into a zone, the gecko started twitching its tail, and my leg started to jerk sympathetically but involuntarily as well. Su’a Paul Sulu’ape paused in his tapping to ask if I was OK, and all I could do was point at the geckos. I was in so much pain, I considered tapping out in the first minute as the sensation of fire shot up my leg.