A 19-year-old was left with a tattoo enthusiast’s worst nightmare after an ink session gone wrong overseas.
Huddersfield teen Millie Nicholls geared herself up to get a trendy new design tattooed down her arm on the last day of a family holiday to Andalusia, Spain.
On 10 May, Millie was ready to get what is known as Gen Z’s equivalent of the tribal tattoos that were popular in the 1990s.
If you’ve got some ink yourself, you’ll be familiar with cybersigilism designs, futuristic-looking, spiky line work that features ancient sigil symbols, which are bizarrely believed to have links to magic.
However, it turned out that the Spanish tattoo artist didn’t fully understand the design she was looking for, which ran down the length of her arm.
Prior to the tattoo machine being fired up, Millie confirmed that she was happy with the design that he showed her on his iPad, before settling back for the painful session.
It didn’t look right to the 19-year-old (Kennedy News and Media)
The Brit chose to look away as he traced the stencil – almost too well.
When she did decide to look down, the teen released that he had royally messed up and given her too much ink.
Reflecting on the work done on her right arm, Millie called the tattoo artist ‘lazy’ and pointed out that he copied the design out entirely, which included the design outline of the hand and arm.
This meant that she had faint lines on the outside of her hand and arm, which was meant to be a reference for the artist when drawing up the design.
In its entirely, the ink took under an hour to do, and Millie asked the artist if he could try to mend the ‘horrible’ work he had done, leading to the artist trying to shade the inking out.
Unfortunately, she wasn’t pleased with the amended design, and now says that it’ll set her back hundreds of pounds to get it off via laser.
Millie is now urging others to do their research before getting inked overseas.
The tattoo artist completely messed up Millie’s design (Kennedy News and Media)
The West Yorkshire-native said that he ‘seemed professional’ over Instagram, and that it ‘really hurt’ when he was inking her fingers.
Noting that she was looking away, she added: “There was ink all over my hand so I couldn’t really see when I did look.
“He stopped and washed it away and I looked and my mum asked me if I asked for that (the line around my hand),
“I said ‘no I didn’t ask for that’, he’d just done that.”
While it wasn’t done yet, she admitted it would have ‘looked really stupid’ if it was left alone.
“He said he’d shade it for no extra charge. He did it and it just looked worse,” she recalled.
Millie said the design itself was good, but was ‘shocked’ by his mistake and pointed out: “He could have gone a bit deeper in some places because it’s already fading.”
Luckily, a tattoo artist in the UK helped her fix it, after being ‘in shock’ until she landed back on British shores.
The Brit made a TikTok about the tattoo mishap (Kennedy News and Media)
The teen explained that she’d have to save up for a laser tattoo removal, which would ‘hurt a lot more’ than a regular tattoo, adding onto the pain of the needle and seeing the wrong design the first time.
She claimed that her sister has been blocked by the artist online, suggesting that it’s probably because of the TikTok they posted.
“I made another video and I blocked his face out of it because I didn’t want to be that kind of person but I think he blocked us.
“I think because we told him that it was our last day there, he didn’t really care about doing our tattoos that much,” Millie claimed.
She has urged people to ‘do more research’ when looking for artists overseas, maybe even asking locals that have ink of their own.
The Huddersfield teen added: “If the tattoo is 50 euros or less than that’s a big red flag.
“For all of the stuff they use to do your tattoo it costs them about 50 euros so they wouldn’t be making any profit unless they’re using cheap stuff.”