David Weisberg struggles with severe seasonal depression. Four years ago, when he was 38, he was having a “bad week, month, whatever,” he recalls, so he asked his daughter, then eight, if she would draw him a sunrise. She did—and then he had it tattooed on his left forearm.
What to do with kids’ art is a controversial topic in many households. Should you trash your children’s drawings the instant they look away, or hoard their scribbles until they’re parents themselves? It turns out that there’s a third way, one that saves space while also allowing you to keep their art forever.
Thirty-two percent of adults have tattoos, according to a 2023 Pew study, and the number one reason that people get them is to honor or remember a person or thing. Meanwhile, according to Pew, parents today are putting a greater emphasis on showing love and building relationships with their children. Over the past decade, celebrities—David Beckham, Jason Momoa, Taye Digs, and Chrissy Teigen among them—began inking their kids’ art and signatures on their bodies. Today you can find viral TikToks of normie parents surprising kids with tats of their artwork.
These “tattoodles” fit with a wider trend of the so-called ignorant tattoo, which emerged over the last 15 years. Inspired by French street artist and tattooist FUZI, untrained enthusiasts started purchasing tattoo machines online and giving each other scribbly tattoos. The trend grew in popularity as Instagram did; Scarlett Johansson went to FUZI to get her squiggly horseshoe tattoo in 2012.
While the term ignorant tattoos “is not the best,” says Shelley Darling, 44, a tattooist at, and co-owner of, Tyger Tyger Tattoo Club in Troy, NY, they are “supposed to be wonky. They’re supposed to be fun.”
Tattoos may be especially subject to trends—think: tramp stamps, Chinese lettering, Rihanna’s underboob Egyptian goddess—but “once everybody has one, people start wanting to be more individual,” says Darling. Kids are “able to see things that we don’t see, that we lose as we get older. You look down. You laugh, and you’re like, ‘I need to relax. It’s not that serious.’”
Women and the LGBTQ+ community have especially pushed tattoo culture away from the stereotypical scary tattoos, Darling says, but heterosexual men are also branching out from skulls and tribal bands: “Men are really starting to understand that they can go a little bit softer.”
Many men, says Weisberg, “were told a very specific way we were supposed to care, the sort of harsh love. There’s times for harsher love. That being said, I don’t believe it has to be that way. We can show our kids we love them and how important they are to us.” He had his tattooist surround his sunrise with roses to represent his daughter’s best friend, who passed away when she was 11 (her last name was Rose).
Tattoos are no longer seen as “taboo” or “job stoppers,” says Sue Garcia, 44, who is part owner of Through Being Cool Tattoo in Fairless Hills, Pennsylvania. She says her clients represent “such a melting pot. There’s so many different personalities. People push the limits of what you would expect to be a tattoo.”
When Garcia does a tattoo of a kid’s drawing, she often has the child help. They will put on rubber gloves and place the stencil themselves. She’s done over 20 tattoodles, including for Mike Brecko, 41, who has a tattoo on his calf that his daughter designed: a blue, purple, and pink unicorn.
Brecko’s daughter was four when she drew it. “At that age, I couldn’t draw a smiley face,” he says. He has other tattoos, including the “quintessential skull and crossbones” that he got when he was 19, but people comment on his daughter’s art the most.
I myself have numerous tattoodles dancing around my forearm. Every year, I have each of my kids design a new character to add to the crew; many of them are supposed to be me or other family members, and they note my kids’ birth order and ages.
When Darling’s then nine-year-old nephew forgot to bring her a card on her birthday, she handed him a piece of paper and pen. He returned with a comic strip in which she tells him to make her a card and he gets frustrated. From the comic, she pulled his self-portrait for a tattoo: an image of him with an exclamation point over his head, practically growling at her demand.
“It reminds me of the fact that he’s still got to make birthday cards for his auntie,” she says, laughing. “He doesn’t get to just grow up and not be the child that we love.”
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