Tattoos: An Expensive Hobby or a Lifetime Investment?

If we were speaking of any other topic, the issues of cost, permanence, and visibility would be seen as positive, but when we speak of tattoos, all of these, for some reason, become lines of attack.

When we discuss cars, jewellery, or technology, the price is often seen as a sign of quality, but this attitude is ignored when we talk of tattoos. The ink that we choose to put on – or should that be put under – our skin is dismissed or even criticised as a waste of money. People I speak to are shocked when I tell them how much money I have spent on this body modification – around the £4,000 mark currently – but in the same conversation they are more than happy to announce how much they spent on Friday night in a club, or on Saturday afternoon at the shops.

Yes, tattoos are expensive, but as with anything else in this world, you get what you pay for. A poorly designed smudge could be as little as £20, but when you are going to be carrying it around with you for the rest of your life, why not pay a bit more to ensure quality.

And it is this combination of price and permanence where tattoos really find their value.

My £4,000 worth of ink is roughly a decade in the making, meaning that, on average, I am spending £400 a year on tattoos. Though they may not be to everyone’s taste, I doubt anyone could criticise someone for spending that much money on something they love over the course of 12-months. Whether you call it art or a hobby or even an addiction (in the best possible sense of the word), £400 a year, all things considered, is a reasonable price to pay.

Now I must apologise in advance for the inclusion of some maths here, but the figures really help to demonstrate my point.

My £400 a year on tattoos is the equivalent of just over £33 per month. And to put this into perspective, the average person in the UK spends £40 a month on alcohol, the average dog owner in the UK spends £158.33 a month on their pet, and in 2012, the RAC said that it cost on average £557 a month to own and run a car.

All of these things, alcohol, a dog, a car, have a limited length of life. Alcohol and its effects, last hours, a dog is a decade or so, and a car is about the same. But the permanence of tattoos means that the £33 I spend a month on tattoos is an investment for life.

Let’s say I stop getting tattoos, and that the £4,000 I have spent to date is all I will ever spend on inking my body. If I live to be 79.5 years old (the average life expectancy of UK males in 2015) then my annual average spend on tattoos is just £50.31.

If we see tattoos as a life’s investment, then the longer you live, the cheaper they become.

Unlike other hobbies or items, tattoos do not need to be replaced or upgraded.

As I said previously, the issues relating to the cost of tattoos, their permanence, and their visibility do lead to questions and criticisms. There have been occasions whereby I have visited poorer countries, or walked past a charity worker, or a homeless person on the street, and the thought strikes me “what must I look like to them.”

When I apologise for not being able to help them or give them money, what must they think when they see my body decorated in such a fashion. For a time I thought that it was vulgar to have this display of tattoos and this show of wealth. I thought that maybe I looked like a walking £4,000 note more concerned with decorating myself than helping other people. But such thinking was a mistake.

The fact that we can carry our tattoos around with us anywhere and everywhere we go makes it unique to almost any other hobby or purchase. Yes, I have spent £4,000 on ink, but as I mentioned, this was over a period of a decade. If we continually carried ten-years’ worth of purchases around with us, then I would stand out a lot less as the streets would be flooded with armies of coat hangers, salsa lines of shoes, and wheelbarrows of cigarettes.

A 2013 survey found that on average women in the UK buy 13 pairs of shoes and spend £570 on these purchases each year. A decades worth of shoes would equal £5,700 and 130 pairs.

In 2014, a survey conducted by Macmillan Cancer Support found that men in the UK spent an average of £934.44 on alcohol each year. A decade of G&Ts would be almost £10,000 and would leave a hell of a hangover.

Unsurprisingly, the NHS routinely attempts to alert smokers to the dangers they face, but they also provide an economic argument for giving up smoking. Even without the cost of lighters, matches, ash trays, mouthwash, and all the other externals, a 10-a-day smoker would spend £10,950 on cigarettes alone over the course of ten years.

And it is when we look at the cost of tattoos in the right context, comparing them to other purchases and hobbies, that we begin to see their true value. Rather than being written off as a waste of money, it appears that tattoos are in fact one of the most undervalued purchases a person could ever make.


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3 thoughts on “Tattoos: An Expensive Hobby or a Lifetime Investment?

  1. I have an easy answer when people ask about the cost of ‘all that tat on your body’
    ‘I don’t drink, ever, I am fully T Total and have never drunk.
    I don’t smoke, ever.
    I don’t eat meat.
    I have one single vice, tattoos, and I certainly do not judge people by their vices’
    It kinda puts things into perspective when you point it out like that, along with a warm smile.

  2. Spend money on what you want, but don’t tell people that tattoos are investments. They simply are not. I agree 100% with you on people’s spending habits for alcohol etc. However people need to realise that tattoos are not always accepted in work places and in some cases paint a negative image. If you want a tattoo because you think it it will look great good. Just be sure you will be happy with it in when your older, not because of aging skin or fading. People forget tattoo styles go out of fashion just like clothes do.

    1. Well, I think it depends on how you see the term investment. But if you are paying for something, and it alters your appearance and lasts the rest of your life, I can’t see how that isn’t an investment tbh.

      Of course, tattoos are not always accepted in the workplace. I do not dispute that at all. And despite them becoming more and more popular, there are still organisations and people within society where a stigma exists on people with tattoos.

      I think that people who get tattoos for fashion are getting them for the wrong reasons. Speaking for myself, I certainly wouldn’t stop getting ink because it wasn’t fashionable, and I didn’t start getting them because it was a popular thing to do.

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