Taking Down An Idiotic Anti Tattoo Facebook Page

Photo Gallery Follows the Text

The internet can be a very dangerous place, as we all probably know by now. The most dangerous thing—other than the ability to spend thousands of dollars on eBay wasted at 4 in the morning—is the spread of misinformation, often hateful in nature. People see things on the internet and they tend to believe it more often than not. Even if your bullshit radar starts to go off it is working against a tendency to believe what you have read, and this is where things start to get tricky. May we introduce you to a Facebook group entitled “Tattoos Ruin Lives.”

Before you run to grab your pitchfork and torch in anger let us calm you down a little bit—the site is clearly a thing of satire. It’s labeled as “Just for Fun,” but that’s not going to stop people from sharing some of this idiocy. And while those of us in the tattoo community clearly recognize a Pound of Flesh arm (see slide #4 below), some people are going to believe this nonsense and use it to further their previously held bias against the tattooed. And that’s what pisses us off. Sure, we can laugh off a few of these—they are funny at times—the humor is rooted in stereotypes that are all too real. The context doesn’t really matter when you tell a tattooed person that their ink makes them a bad parent—those are fighting words. To you and me this may all seem like a joke, but people are going to believe this tripe and use it to fortify their existing hatred. So while we don’t need to riot against these folks, we do have to knock ’em down a peg or two.

We’ve taken some of their memes and gathered them together in the gallery below. Then we take down each one appropriately. So when your less-than-internet-savvy relative posts one of these on your Facebook send them over here and they’ll see the errors of their ways. Remember, don’t believe everything you read on the internet. Besides this article, of course.