• Posted July 2, 2025

Tattoos Don't Convey Accurate Impressions Of People, Study Says

Tattoos have become a form of self-expression, a means of telling the world something about yourself.

Unfortunately, observers mostly misread these inky cues and misjudge the personalities of tattoo bearers, a new study says.

Study participants tended to agree among themselves on what they think a tattoo says about someone, but their impressions were generally off-base, researchers report in the upcoming August issue of the Journal of Research in Personality.

“When people saw a tattoo, they tended to think at least similarly in what they assumed the person was like,” said researcher William Chopik, an associate professor of psychology at Michigan State University.

“However, the accuracy of these assumptions does not align with reality for most traits,” he added in a news release.

For the study, researchers had 274 adults with 375 tattoos fill out a questionnaire to assess their personality.

The team then showed photos of the people’s tattoos to a second group of 30 college students and professors, and asked them to judge the bearer’s personality solely based on their tattoos.

The judges tended to agree with each other regarding what a tattoo said about a person, but those judgments rarely corresponded to the tattoo owner’s self-reported personality, results show.

People were consistently misjudged on their agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion and neuroticism, when evaluated solely on the tattoos they had.

For example, people with death-related tattoos were judged to be less agreeable and more neurotic, but those observations didn’t track with results from their personality inventory.

There was one exception, however.

People with quirky or wacky tattoos were perceived to be open to new experiences, and that evaluation proved accurate in personality tests. 

Those folks were accurately judged to be more open-minded, interested in seeking new experiences, and appreciative of artistic endeavors.

“We were surprised to see that people accurately judged someone’s openness based only on seeing a photo of a tattoo,” said lead investigator Brooke Soulliere, a research associate at Michigan State, in a news release. “When people see a wacky or goofy tattoo, they assume that person is open to experience. And ... they’re correct about it.”

A next step for future research would be to see if behavior toward tattooed people changes based on these judgments, researchers said.

“For example, women with visible tattoos are less likely to be hired for supervisory positions and are offered a lower salary than peers without visible tattoos,” researchers wrote. 

“Discrimination based on someone having tattoos is likely never acceptable," the study added. "However, as we showed, people make different judgments about different types of tattoos (even if personality was rarely related to the types of tattoos people have).”

More information

The University of Houston has more on tattoos in the workplace.

SOURCES: Journal of Research in Personality, August 2025; Michigan State University, news release, July 1, 2025

What This Means For You

People interested in a tattoo should be aware that their new ink might not be properly understood by observers.