SANTIAGO — On February 20, 2012, Coté Arias, a Chilean fan who founded Morrissey’s Chilean fanclub, met the former Smiths frontman at a fan meet-up in Santiago, Chile. Morrissey signed her forearm in spiky capitalised lettering, which Arias later had traced permanently on to her skin with ink — the endpoint of a years-long plan she set in motion through fan organising. “Morrissey had such an impact on me growing up,” she says. “I struggled with shyness and lacked confidence for much of my life, and his lyrics helped me feel seen while transitioning into adulthood.”
More than a decade later, Arias describes that signature as a durable marker of fandom that now brings professional and personal friction along with it. “The tattoo is very visible,” she says, “so it’s brought up many discussions regarding Morrissey’s comments.” Morrissey has publicly supported a far-right party and made inflammatory comments about immigration, but denies allegations of racism.
Arias’ experience sits inside a broader recalibration that has become increasingly legible to the entertainment business: when audience identity is built around artists, franchises and personalities, the most committed forms of participation can outlast — and collide with — institutional decisions, public statements, and changing norms. Tattoos are an unusually literal version of that problem because they turn cultural affiliation into a permanent signal, visible at work, in public, and on social media.
Fandom as consumer behaviour — and a long-term commitment
Fandoms have long pushed people toward visible signals of loyalty: posters, hours in line, high-spend merchandise purchases, and the unpaid labour of running dedicated social media accounts. At the extreme end, fans have thrown phones at pop stars or ended up in hospital with collapsed lungs due to screaming too much.
The underlying mechanism is not new. “Fandoms” as they are commonly understood — communities of people with a shared passion, often organised around musicians — can be traced back centuries, from followers of Roman gladiators to accounts of admirers of Pan An, a handsome scholar who served during the Chinese Jin dynasty, to the frenzied fans of the 19th-century Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, a phenomenon that became known as Lisztomania.
What has changed is less the existence of these communities than the way entertainment companies structure and monetise attention. Modern fandoms sit alongside industrial systems built around touring, merchandising, streaming distribution, franchise publishing, and the constant demand for audience engagement — an ecosystem increasingly scrutinised by competition regulators and consumer protection authorities for the way it monetises loyalty and data. When a fan adopts a permanent marker — such as a tattoo — the consumer relationship becomes difficult to renegotiate quietly.
When the tattoo becomes the issue, not the fandom
For some people, regret is primarily logistical: placement, employability, and the ongoing requirement to explain a symbol that once felt self-explanatory.
Ella, who grew up with Pokémon through cartoons, Game Boy games and card swapping, got a yellow Pikachu tattoo on her wrist as she started university after wanting a tattoo for years. She remembers feeling proud walking out of the studio. “It felt grownup and bold, but by my mid-20s I started to hate it – particularly the placement,” she says. After being asked about it at a job interview, she started wearing long sleeves to cover it up — even in summer — and after years of embarrassment and “repeating the same story when people asked me what it meant”, she began slowly having the tattoo lasered off. “It’s expensive and painful, but worth it. I think I’d feel more confident without it.”
Grace, from London, made a different economic and aesthetic calculation. She had a Blink-182 smiley logo inked on her hip when she was 15, and by her 20s she began to dislike “having a stupid smiley face on my hip”. She opted for a “cheap cover-up”: a shaded rose. “It’s maybe equally bad, but at least it’s slightly less embarrassing,” she says.
Others keep the mark and accept the misreadings that come with it. Tim, from Bristol, has a tattoo on his knee which says “3:04” in a calculator font, referencing a specific second in a song he loves: White Ferrari, by Frank Ocean. “I got it done when I was 25 and in a very ‘party’ stage of my life,” he says. He liked the idea of a subtle tattoo that would not require explanation, but “the morning after I got it, I realised that if you read it upside-down, the numbers say ‘hoe’”. He says he has no plans to cover it up or remove it: “I think it’s a nice reminder of how careless I was.”
Reputational shocks: when the artist and the fan part ways
The heavier version of tattoo regret is not aesthetic. It is the feeling of being locked into public affiliation after the meaning of that affiliation has changed.
Kai, from Seattle, was 15 when the first Harry Potter film was released. They became a midnight-release regular, bought thousands of dollars’ worth of merchandise and eventually got a Deathly Hallows tattoo. They later came to regret it after reading JK Rowling’s 2020 essay critiquing what she called “the new trans activism”. “I’m non-binary and my partner is a trans woman, so the ‘trans issue’ is something I have personal experience with,” Kai says. “The essay felt to me like a lot of misunderstandings about who and what trans people are. My tattoo now feels like being branded: I cringe when Harry Potter fans see it and try to engage with me about new material.”
For music fans, similar problems can arise around public statements, allegations, or any development that alters the perceived values of a figure whose work was formative. That shift can force a practical decision: remove, cover, reinterpret, or keep the tattoo as a record of an earlier self. It also plays out against a wider policy backdrop in which universities, broadcasters and cultural institutions have been pressed to clarify how they respond when a prominent figure’s views appear to clash with their own diversity or inclusion commitments.
Arias describes choosing reinterpretation rather than removal. She says her conversations about the Morrissey tattoo “have helped me to come to the conclusion that, as fans, we are not forced to like everything the artist does, or agree with their philosophy, which most likely will change over time”. She says that, despite not agreeing with his views, she still considers herself a “Moz megafan”.
Josh (name changed), from Brazil, is reworking his tattoo referencing the 2008 album 808s & Heartbreak by Kanye West — now known as Ye — after the rapper publicly expressed antisemitic sentiments. “I tried to come to terms with it, separating the art from the artist and all that, but it kept bothering me,” he says. He is not alone: a London studio went viral for offering free laser removals of tattoos related to the artist, a glimpse of how reputational shocks can ripple out into small businesses and consumer services.
Post-#MeToo decision-making and the cost of disengagement
Dr Paige Klimentou, a popular culture academic at RMIT University in Melbourne who also works as a receptionist at a tattoo parlour in the city, has had her Brand New-inspired tattoo covered up after sexual misconduct allegations were made against the New York band’s lead singer, Jesse Lacey. “I felt like I was complicit in showing support for Lacey by having it,” she says.
Klimentou describes the choice as part of a broader approach to engagement: she decided to give away her Brand New vinyl, not stream their music or engage with their content. A fresh grooming allegation emerged against Lacey in April 2025.
For fans, disengagement often comes with second-order costs: social friction in communities that previously offered belonging, and the economic weight of sunk spending in merchandise and collectibles that no longer feel neutral to own. The tattoo compresses those pressures into a single problem because it is both public-facing and difficult to reverse.
When allegations move through courts, tattoos become a live issue again
Olivia Jordan, from New Zealand, contemplated covering up her Marilyn Manson tattoo after multiple women made allegations of abuse against the musician. He denies any wrongdoing and has not been convicted of any offence.
Jordan’s decision-making was shaped by the available options: finding the artwork too large to rework into anything other than a blackout sleeve, and learning the substantial cost of removal, she says she has learned to live with the regret. “I look at the tattoo now and fondly remember a time when I didn’t think so much about lifelong consequences,” she says. “I was back in London in my mid- to late-20s, living a completely different lifestyle to now, as a mother with a baby. If I was to give advice to my children, I’d probably recommend going with the band T-shirt instead.”
On January 28, 2026, an LA judge reopened a sexual assault case involving Marilyn Manson under a new California law enabling certain older sexual assault cases to be heard again via a temporary “lookback window” in the state’s civil limitations framework for sexual assault claims, and Manson’s lawyer responded by saying his client “never committed any sexual assault”. As those proceedings move forward, his name — and Jordan’s tattoo — sit at the intersection of personal memory, public accusation and a legal system that is still adjusting to post-#MeToo expectations of accountability.
