Tattoo Statistics

While perusing Google's new Google Scholar, which searches the dark web and helps you find academic works and research papers, I found some very interesting tattoo related articles.

One article in particular caught my eye.

Tattoos and body piercings in the United States: A national data set, written by Anne E. Laumann, MBChB, MRCP (damn that's a lot of letters) and Amy J. Derick, MD. In the report they explain how the participants were chosen and statistics were computed. The report is only nine pages, but I went ahead and pulled out some of the more interesting numbers:

• 24% of respondents have Tattoo's -- 22% Women, 26% Men




• 14% of respondents have Body Piercings




• 37% of respondents have had military experience




• 58% of respondents have spent >= 3 days in jail

Here are some of their juicier conclusions:

• At all levels of education, the prevalence of tattoos was significantly higher among those of lower education.

• Of those with tattoos, 76% had been in jail for 3 days or more multiple tattoos.

• Recreational drug use was significantly more common among the tattooed.

• Â Body piercing varies little by educational status. However, as with tattooing, body piercing occurs more among those who partake in risky activities such as heavy drinking, drug taking, and actions that lead to incarceration.

I've hung out at enough tattoo studios, so the conclusions did not surprise me, but this fact did:

"We found no difference in tattoo prevalence between ethnic groups with presumably all gradation of skin color, except that tattoos were twice as common among those with Hispanic ancestry than all other ethnic groups combined. Presumably permanently decorating the skin is a fashion or a cultural practice rather than appearance driven."

This could be a holdover of past cultural ties to earlier non western tattoo methods, which is an interesting sociological observation, but one for another day.