Turns out, we’re really bad at reading people based on their tattoos. Like, impressively bad.
A new study from Michigan State University found that people consistently make snap judgments about personality traits based on ink (surprise, surprise), but those judgments are usually way off. And not just a little off. They’re-wrong-on-everything-but-one-trait off.
Researchers asked 274 tattooed adults to take a detailed personality test and submit photos of their body art, plus written explanations of what their tattoos meant. Then 30 psychology-trained raters—students, grad students, and professors—looked at the photos. Half got the meaning blurbs, half didn’t. Either way, they were asked to guess each person’s “Big Five” personality traits: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, and openness to experience.
The raters mostly agreed with each other. For example, people with large tattoos were seen as more extroverted, and tattoos with life-affirming or soothing imagery made the wearer seem more agreeable. But when researchers compared those guesses to the actual personality scores? Almost all of them were wrong.
People Think They Can Judge Your Personality Based on Your Tattoos—They’re Almost Always Wrong
There was one exception: openness to experience. People who had quirky, abstract, or downright weird tattoos were slightly more likely to score high on that trait, which reflects creativity and curiosity. As the study put it, people high in openness “may be more likely to eschew convention in favor of diverse types of tattoos that are unlikely to signal conformity.”
But beyond that, the visual stereotypes didn’t hold up. A high-quality tattoo didn’t signal a more conscientious person. A skull tattoo didn’t mean someone was unstable or cold. And even when raters were given written descriptions—actual explanations of what the tattoos meant—it barely improved their accuracy.
The study, published in the Journal of Research in Personality, highlights just how much we rely on appearance to make quick reads on people, even when the clues we’re using are wildly unreliable. “Although there was consensus about the personalities of people who had a particular tattoo,” the authors wrote, “these judgments were largely inaccurate.”
So, next time you assume the girl with the floral forearm tattoo is sweet, or the guy with the sleeve of grim reapers has commitment issues, maybe check yourself.
Your tattoos say something. But maybe not what people think they do. And as someone with ink all over my arms, I can pretty much guarantee: whatever story you’re making up in your head about me, it’s probably not the right one.
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