MGK Ignored Artist Warnings to Complete Blackout Tattoo and Got ‘Really Sick’
The artist MGK realized he had to make a change. He said that he didn’t like the variety of tattoos on his body and decided to cover them up with a blackout tattoo over the majority of his arms and torso. When his tattoo artist told him that the design would take two years to complete, he told her to do it on a much shorter timeline. This abbreviated timeline resulted in him getting sick.
MGK said he wanted to make a change to his tattoos
On May 22, MGK released the collaborative mixtape Blog Era Boyz. This is his return to hip-hop as a genre. He said that with the new sound, he also wanted to make a physical change.
“I was looking for a change that wasn’t just a sound wave,” he told Billboard Canada. “It had to be something physical.”
He decided he wanted to cover up his multitude of tattoos because they reminded him of the different phases of his life.
“I saw death and drugs in all these patterns that I was literally writing on my body,” he says. “There were happy tattoos, sad tattoos, holy tattoos, hellish tattoos. It was like my bipolarity was screaming off my skin.”
MGK ignored the tattoo artist’s advice
He found tattoo artist ROXX and reached out to her about creating a design for him. She came back to him with a “dark mode” tattoo that covered his arms, chest, and stomach in ink.
She told him that the design would likely take two years to complete. He wanted it done in two months, though.
“She warned me that it was going to be near impossible, even from a pain tolerance standpoint,” he said. “I said, ‘yeah, we got two months.’”
Despite the warning, he went ahead with his timeline. Every day, he drove to her studio to add to the design.
He got sick because of the tattoo
Typically, a design this big requires breaks for healing. Because they didn’t wait, he said that the tattoo started making him sick.
“After the first week, we hit my lymph nodes around my armpits and shoulders, and I got really sick,” he said. “My skin was turning yellow. I wasn’t able to sleep. I stopped being able to move certain parts of my upper body.”
Still, he pushed through, which he said made him feel proud of himself.
“I came out the other side extremely inspired,” he said. “Not just because of what I had done, but because of what I had to overcome.”
