Tattoo Pain Chart: Where It Hurts Most, and Why

Nobody has measured this, including us

Every tattoo pain chart you will find, this one included, is a summary of what artists and clients report. There is no instrument behind any of them. Pain is subjective, it moves with sleep, food, mood and how the day has gone, and two people with the same tattoo in the same place will give you two different numbers.

What the ordering below is actually tracking is anatomy, and anatomy does not vary much. Thin skin over bone hurts. Dense nerve endings hurt. Somewhere with muscle or fat between the needle and the bone hurts less. That is the whole mechanism, and it is why the chart looks roughly the same wherever you find it.

Read it as a ranking rather than a score. It is reliable about which spots are worse than which others, and not reliable about what a number will feel like to you.

The chart

Ten is the worst most people report. Nothing here is unbearable, and people sit through all of it every day.

Where	Typical level	Why
Outer thigh	2 to 3	Muscle and fat, almost no bone near the surface, few nerve endings
Outer upper arm	2 to 4	The usual first-tattoo spot for a reason
Forearm, outer	3 to 4	Some bone at the wrist end, comfortable for most of its length
Calf	3 to 5	Fine over the muscle, sharper on the shin side
Upper back, shoulder blade	3 to 5	Broad and muscled, until you reach the blade itself
Inner arm, inner thigh	5 to 6	Thin, rarely exposed skin with more nerve endings
Lower back	5 to 6	Comfortable until the work crosses the spine
Stomach	5 to 7	Varies more between people than almost anywhere else
Neck, throat	6 to 8	Thin skin, and the sound travels through your jaw
Hands and fingers	7 to 8	Bone immediately under the skin, and constant movement
Feet and ankles	7 to 9	Same again, with less padding anywhere
Elbows and knees	8 to 9	Bone with nothing over it, and the joint moves while you work
Spine	8 to 9	Directly over vertebrae for the whole line
Sternum and ribs	8 to 10	The one almost everybody names. Thin skin, bone underneath, and your own breathing moves it

If you are choosing the spot first and the picture second, the design library is sorted by placement as well. The leg tattoo designs sit on the easy end of this chart, the shoulder tattoo designs in the middle, and the hand tattoo designs near the sharp end.

What the numbers mean

The column says two to three or eight to ten, so it is worth saying out loud what the scale is. One is a sensation you would not call pain. Ten is the worst you personally have felt. Everything in the chart is someone’s answer to “where would you put that”, which makes it a pain scale in the loose sense and not a measurement in any sense.

Three or four is the number most people give an outer arm, and it is usually described as scratching rather than stabbing. Five or six is where it stops being background and starts needing attention. Eight and above is where people ask for breaks, and where a long session gets split into two shorter ones.

Your own tolerance moves the whole column up or down by a point or two, and it is not fixed either: the same person sits differently on a good night’s sleep than on four hours.

Is there a different chart for men and women

Almost every pain chart you will find comes in two versions, one drawn on a male outline and one on a female one. Look at the orderings and they are the same chart.

That is not a trick, it is anatomy. What the ordering tracks is how much sits between the needle and the bone, and how many nerve endings are in the skin there. Ribs are thin skin over bone in everybody. An outer thigh has muscle and fat over the bone in everybody. Nothing about that reorders.

What does vary is padding, and it varies far more between two people than between averages. A spot that is comfortable on one person is sharp on another with less over the bone in the same place, and that has nothing to do with which outline the chart was drawn on. The two body-specific notes worth having are that a sternum piece crossing breast tissue is a different experience from one directly over bone, and that hips and lower backs differ enough in padding to move a point either way.

There is research on whether pain is perceived differently between men and women, it does not agree with itself, and a tattoo studio is not the place to settle it. What can be said is the part that matters when you are choosing a placement: the chart does not reorder, so use the ordering and then adjust it for your own body and your own day.

What changes the number more than the placement does

How long you are under the needle. The first hour is not the hard part. Hour three is. A large piece on an easy spot can be harder than a small piece on a bad one, purely because of how long you sit.

Whether you have eaten. This is the single most useful thing on this page. Arriving hungry is the most common reason a session goes badly, and it is entirely avoidable. Eat a real meal beforehand and keep something sweet within reach.

Sleep. A bad night lowers what you can tolerate more than most people expect.

Alcohol. It does not help, it thins the blood, and it makes the work harder to do well. Leave it until afterwards.

Outlining against shading. Outlining is the sharper sensation, shading is duller and more like scraping, and most people find the outline worse and the shading longer.

Where you are. Being somewhere you feel safe genuinely changes how a session goes. Tension makes everything hurt more, and a room you know is easier to relax in than a room you do not.

What it feels like, in the words people actually use

Not a stab. The words that come up over and over are scratching, burning, and a hot cat scratch dragged slowly. On the ribs and the sternum people describe vibration more than sharpness, because the sound and the feeling travel through the bone.

The anticipation is worse than the first ten minutes. Almost everybody reports the same shape: bad at the start, then the body settles, then it gets harder again late in a long session.

If you are worried about the pain

Some things that genuinely help, none of which cost anything:

• Pick an easier placement for a first tattoo. Outer arm or outer thigh, and move to the harder spots once you know how you handle it.
• Keep the first one short. Ninety minutes tells you a great deal about yourself.
• Eat beforehand, and say if you need to stop. Breaks are normal and asking for one is not a problem.
• Breathe out slowly through the sharper passages rather than holding your breath.
• Do not take painkillers that thin the blood beforehand. Ask a pharmacist or a doctor rather than guessing, because more bleeding means a harder session and a worse-looking result.

Afterwards

The soreness is the easy half. Most people describe sunburn rather than pain, and it eases over three or four days. What lasts longer is the itching while it heals, which is harder to ignore than the soreness ever was.