Aftercare guide
Aftercare mistakes that cost people ink
Most lists of tattoo aftercare mistakes are fifteen items long because fifteen sounds thorough. In reality four things actually cost people ink, a few more cause avoidable grief, and several of the things people panic about are not mistakes at all.
The short answer
Picking, friction, sun and drowning it in product. Those four are responsible for most of the touch-ups artists have to do. Everything else on this page is worth knowing, but if you only get those four right you will almost certainly be fine.
The four that actually cost you ink
1. Picking, peeling or scratching
This is the one. Nothing else is close.
A healing tattoo will flake, and the flakes will hang there half-attached, and they will drive you mad. Pulling one off feels like tidying up. What you are actually doing is tearing away skin that has not finished releasing, and taking pigment with it. That is precisely how you get a patchy tattoo with pale gaps in the linework, and it is not fixable with more moisturiser. It is fixable with another appointment and more money.
Same goes for scratching an itch. The itch is real and it is maddening, and the answer is to tap it, or moisturise it, or sit on your hands. Not to scratch it.
If a flake is hanging on, it is hanging on for a reason. Leave it. It falls off in the shower when it is ready, and that is the only removal method you should be using.
2. Friction
Under-discussed and enormously destructive. Anything that rubs a fresh tattoo repeatedly will pull ink out: a bag strap, a bench at the gym, a tight sleeve, a seatbelt, a bedsheet you toss against all night.
This is the reason a fresh forearm tattoo and a heavy lifting week are a bad combination, and it is worth planning around rather than hoping for the best.
Training with a new tattooWhen you can go back, which movements to skip, and why friction matters far more than sweat.Read the gym guide →3. Sun
Sunlight is the single biggest long-term threat to a tattoo, and Australia is a bad place to be casual about it.
On a fresh tattoo, direct sun on unhealed skin is a genuinely bad idea and you should be covering it with clothing, not sunscreen, until it has fully closed. After that, the tattoo needs protecting for the rest of its life, and that means actual sunscreen on healed skin every time it is exposed.
Nobody does this. It is why so many older tattoos look washed out and grey, and it has nothing to do with the artist or the ink.
4. Drowning it in product
More is not better. A tattoo slathered in a thick layer of anything is a tattoo sitting in a warm, damp, sealed environment, and skin that stays wet goes soft, pale and fragile. Fragile skin tears. Torn skin over fresh ink is a touch-up.
A thin layer, worked in until it is gone. If it still looks shiny and wet a minute later, you have used too much. This is the most common mistake by volume, and people make it because they are trying hard.
The ones that cause real grief
Less likely to ruin the tattoo outright, very likely to make your fortnight worse than it needed to be.
Soaking it
Baths, pools, spas, the ocean, long hot showers. Submerging a fresh tattoo softens the skin, lifts scabs early, and introduces whatever is in the water into an open wound. Showers are fine, quick and not too hot. Everything else waits until it has fully closed and stopped flaking, which usually means two to three weeks.
Dirty hands
You have an open wound and you are about to touch it. Wash your hands first, every single time, and do not dig into a tub of balm with unwashed fingers and then do it again tomorrow.
Cling film for days
Your artist may wrap you to get you home. That wrap comes off within a few hours. Re-wrapping in cling film every night for a week, which people still do, creates a sealed, airless, warm pocket of plasma against a wound. It is the worst possible environment and it is completely avoidable.
Leaving second skin on too long, or too little
Film bandages work well and they are widely misused. Leaving one on for a week because it is convenient, or panicking and ripping it off dry on day one, both cause problems. There is a right way to use them and it is worth reading before you are standing in the shower trying to peel one off.
Using and removing second skinHow long to leave it on, what the pooled fluid underneath means, and how to take it off without taking skin with it.Read the second skin guide →Fragranced products
Fragrance is the leading cause of contact dermatitis in cosmetics, and a healing tattoo is a terrible place to discover you react to it. If your moisturiser smells strongly of anything, it is not the right product for this fortnight.
Tight or synthetic clothing
Compression gear over a fresh tattoo is friction, heat and trapped sweat in one convenient package. Loose and breathable, for two weeks.
Letting it dry out completely
The opposite failure to over-moisturising, and less common, but it happens with people who have been scared off products entirely. Skin that is allowed to go bone dry cracks, and cracks in a healing tattoo split through the ink. A thin layer, regularly. The goal is supple, not wet and not parched.
The things people panic about that are not mistakes
A fair chunk of aftercare anxiety is spent on things that are either normal or irrelevant. Worth saying out loud, because the panic itself leads to fiddling, and fiddling is how tattoos get damaged.
Ink on the wrap or the sheets. Normal. Your tattoo weeps plasma and excess ink for the first couple of days. It is coming off the surface, not out of the tattoo.
It looks cloudy or faded around week two. Normal, and it is the single most common cause of unnecessary panic. A layer of dead skin is sitting over the ink. It clears.
It is a bit raised. Normal for weeks, sometimes months, especially on heavy linework. Raised and itchy is normal. Raised, hot, spreading redness and pus is not, and that is a doctor, not a forum.
You missed one moisturising session. Nothing happened. Carry on.
Is this normal?Peeling, cloudy, itchy, raised, patchy or weeping. What each one means, and the specific signs that mean see a doctor.Read the troubleshooting guide →The mistake nobody counts
Every list of aftercare mistakes stops at the four week mark, as though the job is finished. Then people wonder why a tattoo they paid two thousand dollars for looks tired at year five.
The single most consequential thing you can do for a tattoo happens after it has healed, and it is boring: keep the skin over it moisturised and keep it out of the sun. Dry, neglected, sun-battered skin scatters light, and ink viewed through it reads flat and hazy no matter how good the work underneath is.
A tattoo is not a wound you get through. It is a thing you own, and it lives in skin that needs looking after for as long as you have it. Ten seconds a week, and sunscreen when you are outside. That is the whole maintenance routine, and almost nobody does it.
Disclosure: Tattoo Standard is published by Penguin Tattoo Co, an Australian brand that makes tattoo aftercare products. We have not named or linked any product in this article, our own included.