What is the dumbest tattoo you have ever seen?

Maybe not quite as dumb as others here, but I once saw a woman in a sauna who had a GIANT 女 (woman) on her back. It went from the shoulders to the ass. I get finding Chinese characters cool and wanting them tattooed, but why on earth would you just tattoo "woman" instead of something meaningful and why so large it covers your entire back?

- That's just sad.
- Alright, folks lock the thread, we have a winner. Lol
  God, there's a huge part of me that hopes this isn't real, but I've also been on the 'net long enough to know better.
  
  Unfortunately this is 100% real.
- oh
  oh no
  Can we get an interview from her in 4 years?
  
  We can! So long as they let women speak for themselves in four years.

In my late teens, maybe 20 I worked in a restaurant and got invited to a party after work in a very rough part of town. So rough that the taxi driver wouldn't let us get out until we found the exact address (this would have been mid nineties so well before GPS nav was popular).
Anyway we get there. Folks are nice. Maybe ten in total plus the 4 of us from work. They're rough around the edges but generally salt of the earth characters which I love so it's all going well. Get chatting to one lad and he shows me his new tattoo on his forearm that his friend had done for him.
It was a palm tree on a tiny desert island with a dude sitting against the tree smoking a massive joint.
Now this monstrosity was one colour, all outlines, looked like it was done with a compass from your school pencil case and my 11 year old would have done a better job. It's very difficult to describe just how shite it was.
Felt really sorry for the lad. He was definitely going to regret it if he didn't already. Never forgot that tattoo though.
- Reminds me of a dude I met at college. Had the shittiest arm tattoos known to man. I’m talking 5th grade blurry doodles. His response was, “I was trying to get with a hot girl at a party giving out tattoos”.
  
  Ooooof.

My tattoo is very well designed, but it is a lotus flower with the Om symbol in it because at the time I was practicing a lot of yoga, and I didn't realize it looks kind of...... culturally foolish, shall we say, especially now that I live in a city with a lot of South Asian folks, and some have asked me about it, I am white as the driven snow. I did not intend it in any cultural appropriation way and it isn't offensive or anything, they all seem to like it, but it was a bit thoughtless ultimately.
- Totally chill, it really is fine, they won't take it seriously.
  It's not cultural appropriation to practice another's religion, in whole or in part, belief and spirituality is one area where you should feel free of judgement, we're all just finding our best path.
  
  Thank you. I just felt a little silly.
- Nobody owns culture, don't stress about it.
- As a human being that shares this earth with the rest of us...I don't see anything wrong with this. You were practicing lots of Yoga, and it was significant enough for you to outwardly mark yourself with it, you can back up the fact you studied and immersed in that (sub)culture.
  You clearly didn't just spot it on the wall and go "lol that looks cool." While drunk or something lol.
  I am white as the driven snow.
  It sounds like this is where some perceived guilt is coming from. Contrary to what sections of the internet will tell you, there's nothing wrong with consciously adopting a culture that meant something to you. Even if you're "white."
  There's this weird expectation that white folks should only be able to get tattoos of like, what, the Wonderbread logo, or Elvis or something LOL.
  they all seem to like it
  This speaks volumes in itself. It's obvious to the people OF that culture that you're not just some poseur ripping them off to self-aggrandize. They seem thrilled to meet someone who saw it and said "I want to learn from them!" This is why humanity is beautiful.
  The world's a smaller place now. People move. Cultures evolve now as they always have. That's how traditions like Yoga or Kung Fu traveled across the world in the first place right?
  I'm just some guy on the internet, but It sounds like a cool tattoo, and I hope maybe you can feel less burdened by it, especially when it doesn't cause anybody else any harm.
  Sounds like the opposite, actually! It seems like it gives you a connection to others and has started a lot of conversations, when you'd otherwise be seen as an outsider!
  
  Thank you for saying this. I genuinely would never not take someone's cultural practices and religion seriously. I just really like what it symbolizes to me.

I once shared a hospital room with two old geezers after surgery, and one of them had a visit from their grandson. The dude had Nazi tattoos all over his face, swastikas, SS lighting bolts, 88's, the iron cross, the whole collection.
When the Nazi loser left, the old guy complained to us others in the room: "Lovely kid that... Such a shame he cannot get a job. I cannot understand why! Such a decent boy, has a forklift drivers license and everything!"
So yeah, in total that might have been the densest occurrence of idiocy I have ever witnessed.
- I don't think I would have been able to hold my tongue in that situation lol. I 100% would have blurted out something about his tattoos
  
  Understandable. It's hard for me to shut up too sometimes when I feel like being witty, but even doped up I realised well enough that I'd be stuck there for days with a pissed off Nazi sympathizer if the gramps took it badly.
- I have heard that gangs and cults sometimes use facial tattoos to ostracize their members from society at large and prevent them from forming an external support network.
  
  And some people do it to themselves, on purpose.
- I am so baffled by people like this. Bet he talked about how happy he was that Germany was defeated in world war 2, as well…
  I came here to say I knew someone who had an eye ball on a skateboard with flames at the back of the eye…

I will probably get a lot of flak for that but I would be tempted to say: any tattoo one can't easily remove.
Don't get me wrong, there are some wonderful tattoos out there, there is no question about that but isn't it a bit... presumptuous to think one will like a drawing or a some text inked under their skin... forever? That's the reason why I never got tattooed.
- I have a rule for my tattoos. I design the general idea, on paper, and date it. If I still think it's a good idea for a tattoo a decade later, I will get it. I have 4 so far.
  
  I quite like this approach :)
- I think one of the bigger misunderstandings of why people get tattoos is that they do it “because they will love the image forever.“ It’s more useful to think of it as a snapshot, a permanent time capsule that you can always look at. So yeah, you don’t want to get something you will truly hate to look at later, But your taste evolves and there is a bit of an art to getting something that you will still look back on fondly. Like a poem you wrote in high school that still makes you smile, even if you’re a much better writer now.
  Ask people about their tattoos and you’ll often hear them say “I got it because I liked how it looked.” It was that simple. Especially if it’s not their first tattoo.
  
  Thx a lot, it's very interesting.

I saw a kid, like 20 at the most, walking around with his shirt off, and on the top of his back was the name of a removals company and a mobile number. Not particularly well done, and I’d bet it wasn’t even his company

I know a guy who got Abe Simpson crawling out of his butt crack.
- Meh, that is more funny than dumb, it is normally hidden under clothes.
  
  I have a mustache tattooed above my dick. It was for Movember, so why not there. I don't take photos in the nude, and I'm happily married to my wife, who finds it funny.
  I'm am considering getting a tramp stamp, only as a mustache. My wife does not like it, but gets why I want it, as a joke. We're also the age when tramp stamps got popular with our friends, so my wife gets the joke.
- You win

A guy at my work got promoted to manager and celebrated by tattooing the company logo onto his chest. Pretty much everyone had to hold back laughing when he showed it off.

I have a distant relative with a traffic light tattooed in the middle of his forehead, just a black rectangle with red, yellow, and green circles.
And on either side he has some graffiti style writing that I'm pretty sure says "con man"
I became aware of him because we share a fairly uncommon last name, and one day police came to my house grasping at straws looking for this guy because he had been breaking into cars, so the basically went to the first person with the same last name they could find to see if we knew where he was.
It was the first time I'd heard of him, we're not at all close with the extended family. Eventually I looked him up and found his social media with those stupid tattoos.
- I have a distant relative with a traffic light tattooed in the middle of his forehead, just a black rectangle with red, yellow, and green circles.
  Are any of the lights on?
  
  All 3 of them, but no one's home
  He's got a few other stupid tattoos. He's got some more words tattooed above the stoplight in sort of a fancy script, but I can't really make them out because he's always wearing a hat. Some knuckle tattoos I can't make out because in all his pictures he's either holding a 40 of old English or flipping off the camera (or both) so his hands are always contorted weirdly, a few words that he probably thought sounded tough, some symbols I don't recognize, and a crucifix on one arm and a devil holding a cross on the other that might be actually kind of well-done but I don't have a great eye for tattoos.
  He's a shrimpy white guy with a patchy beard, who grew up in what passes for the ghetto in an otherwise pretty nice suburban area (not to sell it short, it is a pretty shitty town, once in a while it manages to crack some "Top X Most Dangerous Cities in state/country" sort of article, but compared to the "bad neighborhoods" in pretty much any major city it's nothing)
  I could go on for quite a while about him and the rest of that branch of the family, and all the dumb bullshit they've done even though I've never met most of them, their reputation far precedes them. All through grade school the prevailing advice from my parents was "if anyone asks if you know/are related to any other [our last name]s, just say 'no'" and that's always served me well.
  None of his profiles seem to have been updated in about 10 years, so with any luck he's locked up somewhere, or maybe dead. Or maybe he had just enough sense to stop broadcasting his dumbassery out onto the open internet.

I worked in Indiana, and actually got to see that dude with the Romney campaign logo on his face.
- Dude what an idiot
  https://www.politico.com/story/2012/11/romney-tattoo-mandoes-an-about-face-084350
  
  Least deranged and dishonest Republican.

Have a cousin with a Budweiser logo on her lower back ala "tramp stamp".
Honestly, I think it's cringe to have any logo or IP on your body.
- I have "Lemmy" tattooed across my elbow
  
  Big Motörhead fan?

I came across a Twitch streamer with his username tattooed across his knuckles in Norse Runes, except it was spelled wrong. He had ᚦ (Th) in place of ᚲ (K or C) which is far from similar in pronunciation. A quick Google search of the wiki page for Norse Runes could have avoided this issue too.
- Luckily for him, nobody ever has to know unless he volunteers that information

This is hardly the dumbest one originally but I worked construction in high school and college. One old dude had gotten “RESPECT” tattooed on his abs in his youth. By the time I met him, he had a beer belly and had had some injuries and surgeries. It was just a completely different font/message.
By contrast, the best tattoo I’ve seen is a friend who is a musician. She has musical notes tattooed behind her ears. You wouldn’t even know if she did her hair a certain way (for a job interview or something) but when she was ready to party, the musical notes were on display.
I also knew a guy who was an artist who had an amazing sleeve. He obviously cared about the artistic aspect; he literally flew to Japan multiple times to have it done because he cared that much about being a canvas for the specific artist he chose. That was the most impressive. I like the subtlety of the music notes but I’m not against going all out. It’s really the middle-ground — like a drunk tattoo that meant something at the time — where people regret it later.

- Ironic, considering back pieces like this are usually the result of drugs and/or alcohol.
  
  Ironic
  I think you misspelled "iconic"
- That’s wild… hair

I saw this one kid, with a tattoo of a butt on his butt. He kept pulling his shirt up over his head. He said he was from lake titicaca. That boy wasn’t right.
- He said he was from lake titicaca. That boy wasn’t right.
  Are you threatening the great Cornholio?
- Who are you to Judge?
  
  Someone with no butts on their butt, that's who.

I mean, there's definitely gonna be worse out there, but I once saw a tattoo on an online post, of presumably their date of birth in roman numerals.
Problem is, there was only one "M", so it looked something like: IV/X/MCXCIV
But I figured, alright, let's not assume things, maybe they're a history buff and something cool happened on that day in 1194.
But if I remember correctly, I found some list of all Wikipedia articles for specific dates and that day did not have an article, because nothing noteworthy had happened.
So, yeah, I guess we do have to assume that they are in fact a vampire.
- Oh man, there's something that really frustrates me about people with Roman numeral tattoos that do not follow the actual conventions of Roman numerals whatsoever.
  Like you moron, there is a numeral for the year you were born. You don't separate out each digit you fucking dumbass
  
  Can you explain? I thought Roman numerals was just chaining together the various letters
  
  OH that makes so much sense! I had no clue how you'd even parse that lmao
- Assuming 4/10 is 4th October, shouldn't the day be written like "a.d. IV Non(as)" (4 days until the first kalend)
  
  To be honest, I have no idea. I'm not a Roman numerals/date crack myself. The tattoo definitely wouldn't have been faithful in that regard, but it's also not like they intended to be accurate down to that level...

I have a line tattooed on my leg, I lived with a guy who had a tattoo setup, one day I was home alone, reeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaalllly fuckin drunk and stoned, so I decided to tattoo myself, did a little nirvana face thing, then, while I had the tattoo gun in my hand, resting on my leg, I passed out, my foot pressed the pedal and I tattooed a thick line in my leg, woke up as second after and just left it.
I only ever tattooed myself when I was kind of drunk from then on.
- How squiggly is the line?
  
  Edit: I just noticed it kinda looks like the "Do something" meme character.
  
  Straight like Freddie Mercury

Some nazi shit

I'm getting Elmer Fudd on my ass this Monday, so, um, that.
- Please tell me that he's gonna be pointing his gun where I think he's going to. As if he's expecting Bugs to pop out.
  
  I'm also planning on getting a voice bubble that says "come out of there you wascally wabbit"
  
  Absolutely

Mr. Cool ICE 💀
- You take that back

All tattoos are for degens
- WEIL REINE HAUT REINHAUT
  
  Wait what the hell, there's an actual anti tattoo movement in Germany? That's legit hilarious
  
  Ah, ein Mann von Kultur!
- No but being a judgmental prick sure is
  
  Sounds like another person with tattoo regret
- I got to ask. What is your trauma around tattoos? People don't have such strong opinions about what other people do unless there's some serious weight on their minds.
  
  Just got divorced and found out she slept with each tattoo artist she went to and she spent money we didn't have on those, making her progressively uglier and trashier in the process and embarrassing me in front of my family because I had to even later borrow money from them to recover from said tattoos
  My wife was extremely beautiful and was able to book with popular dudes on Instagram because she looked good on their feed but each one was thousands of dollars
  I feel like tattoos can only make you look worse or best case, the same, never better. Told her that during our first date I'm sure and after 10 years she almost had nowhere left on her body left to draw on
  I think it's not tattoos itself but the whole thing around all of the artists being fine with sleeping with my wife because she's hot, I just have such a negative opinion around the entire tattoo culture now and I'm pretty sure like half of tattoo artists are just creeps

A huge 3 leaf clover on the side of a dude's neck, solid filled in green of course. Not to mention the other random tattoos on his face and stuff, but seriously, a 3 leaf clover? Why not a 4 leaf?...
- The 3-leaf clover has religious/national significance in Ireland—there’s a legend about St. Patrick using it to demonstrate the unity of the Christian trinity.
  
  It's a shamrock ☘️.
  
  Interesting. I'll tell ya what though, he was anything but a Christian, nor were his brothers.
  
  TIL

that one your mom got on her butthole .
- Where else you going to get the eye of sauron tattooed on to your body?