Every tattoo is a form of self expression. However, sometimes you can wind up with a work of art on your body that you come to regert (yes, we know what we did there).
That’s even the case for celebrities!
We rounded up 11 stars who have gotten tattoos that they’ve since rethought. Some of the disliked tattoos are tributes to exes, others are spelled wrong and some are just… cringe.
How have they handed the mistake tattoos? Some celebrities lasered them off. Others have come to live with their decisions.
One popular star famously documented the removal of her lower back tattoo, a decision that she might regret again now that Us Weekly has reported a revival of the so-called “tramp stamp.”
Another celebrity even revealed that his wife is encouraging him to keep his unfortunate tattoos instead of removing them.
Scroll through the slideshow to see 10 stars with some tattoo regrets…
Megan Fox
Megan Fox tattooed Brian Austin Green's name on her hip when they were together. They have since broken up, with her finding happiness with Machine Gun Kelly.
In July 2023, Megan covered up the tattoo with a sprawling image of a snake and some flowers. Her tattoo artist shared an image of the new ink and noted that they "completely covered" the only tattoo.
Blake Shelton
If you've ever looked at Blake Shelton's arm, you might wonder what he has tattooed on it. You would not be alone. The country star has what are supposed to be deer tracks wrapping his arm. The tracks were surrounded by barbed wire.
People confuse the tattoo for a variety of things, and Blake doesn't love it either. What happened?
“It’s supposed to have been deer tracks, but there’s a chance that when I had that on there, I had been drinking somewhere in the vicinity of that time and I had to draw the guy what I thought a deer track looked like, so he actually just gave me the tattoo that I drew for him, but it sucks," he told Today (via Hollywood).
Jennifer Lawrence
Jennifer Lawrence got the chemical symbol for water tattooed on herself in a spur of the moment decision when she was with Hunger Games star Liam Hemsworth and his family.
"I was like, well, I'm always going to need to be hydrated, so I guess I should get H2O on my hand," she recalled during an interview with HitFix. "By the way, I know that the two is high and in H2O the two is supposed to be low. I should've Googled it before I got it tattooed on my body forever."
Justin Bieber
Justin Bieber has so many tattoos on his body, but there's one that he took steps to cover up - a tribute to his ex Selena Gomez.
"Uh, this is my ex-girlfriend," Justin said in an interview with GQ (via E). "So I kinda try to cover her face up with some shading, but people still know."
Khloe Kardashian
Khloe Kardashian documented the process of removing her tattoo in a video shared on Instagram. She titled it “Bye Bye Tramp Stamp.”
“The end of an era…. Got this bad boy when I was 16…. Not so cute anymore🙊 I should’ve listened to Kim when she told me “you don’t put a bumper sticker on a Bentley.” Bye-bye bumper sticker,” she wrote in the caption.
Hailey Bieber
Hailey Bieber is on this list with her husband Justin. However, her tattoo isn’t a tribute to an ex. It’s an image of a gun on her finger. The gun is located on her middle finger.
“I think at 18, I was like, ‘Yeah! That looks cool.’ But now, as a 24-year-old, I would never do that. I think guns are violent,” she told Elle.
Angelina Jolie
Angelina Jolie is another star who was left with tattoo regret after putting her ex Billy Bob Thornton's name on her arm. The image was removed after their split, and she replaced it with a tribute to her children.
Ryan Reynolds
Ryan Reynolds has some tattoos, and he regrets them all. “I hate them all," he told The New Yorker, noting that they take hours to cover up when he's filming.
“Still, I’d get them all lasered off if it wasn’t hours and hours of brutal pain," he admitted. There's another thing stopping him: Blake Lively. “But my wife says I should keep them, keep a record of the choices I’ve made.”
Olivia Wilde
Olivia Wilde told Craig Ferguson that she had "one really bad" tattoo. Which one? She has a tattoo of a dragon that got at the age of 13. It's located on her butt.
"I was in New York City and I thought it was a great idea, it had a lot of meaning at the time but now it's hideous," she recalled, describing her tattoo as "an a-s stamp."
The actress added that she formed the Bad Tattoo Club.
Jessie J
Jessie J tattooed the lyrics to her own song on her body. It did not go according to plan. "Yes my tattoo says... 'don’t loose who you are in the blur of the stars,'" she wrote when showing off the ink on Instagram, via USA Today. "Yes they are MY lyrics from my song 'Who You Are.' Yes that I wrote."
The tattoo is located on her side above her hip. She was 18 when she got the tattoo done, and she didn't realize that she'd misspelled a word when she sat for the appointment. She now mostly covers it up with high-waisted pants.
Jelly Roll
Jelly Roll recently admitted that he regretted "almost all" of the ink on his body, saying that they were decisions he made in the past that didn't reflect who he was anymore.
“I realized that almost all of my tattoos represent who I was. None of them represent who I am,” he said. Now, he looks at them and wonders “What the f-ck was I thinking?”
However, that does not mean that Jelly Roll wouldn’t get tattoos if he could start fresh.
“I tell people I regret my tattoos, but I would not not get tattoos,” he explained.
He revealed the advice that he would follow and would share with others moving forward: “If I could do it all over again, I’d have went from the tip of my finger to the back of my head. But I’d have got with the best artist on earth and took my time.”