Tattoo aftercare for beginners

Have you ever thrown out your tattoo care instructions after you left your tattoo appointment?

Did you end up with a scab on your tattoo, or worse, an infection?

Your artist tells you about tattoo care for your brand new tattoo at the end of your appointment. You get a sheet of paper with a list of recommendations on how to proceed from here, and you may even leave the shop with some aftercare products to use to heal your tattoo.

Follow the Tattoo Care Instructions your tattoo artist gives you!!!

If you do, you will enjoy the benefits, such as:

• Easily being able to maintain your tattoo throughout the healing process
• A substantially brighter and more beautiful final healed tattoo
• Healthy skin that is free of infection
• Less itchiness
• No scabbing
• Peace of mind that you are giving your artwork the best possible chance to last

Your tattoo artist has your best interest at heart when they rattle off that long list of tattoo care instructions. They also have their own best interest at heart. Tattoo artists want their work to heal well! After all, when you show off your tattoo, their reputation is on the line.

The first part of tattoo aftercare is making sure that you leave your bandage on when you leave the tattoo studio at least until you get home. Your bandage is there to protect your tattoo from bacteria and other germs that could easily enter your body through your open skin. Avoid having your tattoo bump into walls or accidentally be touched by dirty hands. Keep that bandage on!

Once you are home, it’s time to remove the bandage and clean the tattoo off. You’ll want your hands to be clean before touching your tattoo. Carefully and gently wash off any blood, plasma and ointment off of the skin surface.
You can use your hands, and a gentle unscented soap like Dial is great for cleaning your tattoo. Avoid scrubbing heavily with a sponge or bath poof. This can abrade your tattoo and result in loss of color.

After a few minutes, your tattoo should no longer feel slimy to the touch, and will look clean and clear. This means it does not have any shiny areas of ointment and plasma remaining on the tattoo surface. Great!

You can pat the tattoo dry with a paper towel or let it air dry. Then, you will gently apply a THIN layer of your aftercare product to the tattoo.

You will want to use enough ointment to make the surface appear shiny, but not so much that you clog your pores. Applying too much ointment will make your tattoo have difficulty healing, and cause breakouts and other skin irritations. Too little, and you will risk scabbing and drying out the tattoo surface.

A good rule of thumb is to apply the ointment as thinly as you would apply chapstick to your lips. You don’t like so much that your lips get stuck together or slide all over the place. You probably like just enough to do the job. The same rule applies to tattoos!

Now, all you need to do is be aware of your tattoo throughout the day. If it starts feeling hot or dry, check it to see if you need to apply more ointment. If your tattoo feels slimy or itchy, you may have too much ointment on it and could gently rinse off the excess and start again.

Why do tattoo artists recommend ointment on new tattoos?

Ointment treatment is an important part of tattoo care. The ointment acts as a substitute scab. It is a way of protecting your body from infection without your body having to produce a scab covering. When your tattoo heals without scabbing, the ink is much more likely to stay exactly where it was laid in.

In general, I apply ointment to my own tattoos about 3-4 times per day in the first three days. I was my tattoo in the shower in the morning, and again at night before going to bed. Otherwise, I just keep my hands clean and reapply ointment as necessary in the middle of the day.

If you are wearing clothes that rub against your tattoo, or that cover your new tattoo, you may need to apply more ointment during the tattoo care process than someone who has a tattoo on an open-to-the-air body part. Use your common sense, and you will be fine.

You will not want to cover your tattoo after the initial trip home. The more air your tattoo gets, the faster it will heal.

The less your tattoo is touched (and the less that clothes rub against it), the faster and better your tattoo will heal.

So if you have a new tattoo on your foot, try to go shoeless for a few days and you will have much better results than if you keep your foot in a sock with giant boots on.

When you go to sleep, your tattoo has the potential to dry out since you might end up sleeping on it. If your tattoo gets stuck to your sheets, try not to rip yourself free. Get your tattoo wet and gently remove the offending fabric so that you don’t tear at your tattoo.

I keep a tin of Tattoo Goo by my bedside in the first few nights of tending to a fresh tattoo. If I wake up in the night, I reapply some ointment to the tattoo, then fall back asleep. I also try to keep the new tattoo out from under the blankets to prevent getting stuck.

An option to prevent getting stuck to sheets or bedclothes is to re-wrap your tattoo for the night. You would apply the ointment as usual, and then wrap the tattoo with plastic wrap to “seal in” the ointment and prevent it from rubbing off as you sleep.

A word of caution on choosing this option: Do not keep the bandage on for more than 8 hours. Always wash off the tattoo after it has been bandaged!

You MUST wash off your tattoo every time it gets bandaged in this manner, because putting a solid barrier like plastic over your tattoo can trap bacteria and cause the tattoo to become infected. Plastic wrap also denies oxygen to your tattoo, which is something it needs to heal properly. So don’t wrap your tattoo if you can help it. If you do, make sure it is only for a maximum of 8 hours, and that you immediately wash off the tattoo surface when you wake up and get it some air.

After a few days of treating your tattoo with ointment, switch to using lotion on your tattoo.

We recommend an unscented hand and body lotion because these brands have less potential irritants to your skin. Lotions with glitter and lots of artificial scents can irritate your tattoo (which until it peels is still an open wound!) Treat it with care, and use a gentle lotion in this phase.

On day three, I switch to lotion instead of ointment when healing my tattoos. The lotion helps keep my skin hydrated and by day three, it is less irritating to use lotion than it would have been on day one. The lotion will aid in the peeling process of your tattoo.

That’s right - if you have managed to get through the first few days of healing your tattoo without getting a scab, your tattoo will peel!

The top two layers of skin have died in the process of getting your tattoo put into your skin. The third layer will have accepted the tattoo ink into its cells and be healing very well by now. So, the top layers of your skin will peel away, and fresh new healthy skin will be forming over your tattoo.

This is why tattoos can look incredibly bright on the day they are applied, but healed tattoos look a bit duller - they have to show up through the layers of your skin! If you have pale skin like myself, the colors will be vivid year round. But if you tan or have darker skin, the colors of your tattoo will appear duller or darker through the surface of your skin.

I apply lotion about as often as I had applied ointment in the prior three days. Usually 3-4 applications of lotion is good enough to keep my tattoo feeling good.

Your healing tattoo will be itchy!

If you scratch your tattoo, you risk damaging your skin and possibly rejecting some ink as the damaged skin cells are sloughed off of your body. Instead of scratching, try lightly slapping the area with a clean hand. It feels almost as good as scratching, and will ensure that you are not hurting your tattoo.

Peeling tattoos can look ugly for a few days. Don’t panic if this is your first tattoo and you see it’s vibrant colors suddenly become chalky and grayed down. This is because the surface layers of your skin are starting to separate from the permanent layers of your skin. Once this dead skin has peeled away, your tattoo will once again look beautiful!

Don’t peel your tattoo. Let it happen on its own, and don’t rush it by lifting up skin that is still attached. Yes, it’s cool to peel off a color copy of your tattoo if it happens to fall that way. But don’t rush this process or you risk peeling off a lower layer of skin that was supposed to permanently hold your tattoo!

After about two weeks, most people have completed the entire healing process. During those first two weeks, it is important that you avoid certain activities.

During the first two weeks of your new tattoo:

• Stay out of the sun!
• Stay out of the pool!
• Refrain from using products like coco butter, triple antibiotic or scented lotions.

The sun causes all pigments to fade over time. Have you ever noticed that paintings and photos that are hung in the sun fade a lot faster than photos that hang in a shadier area of your house?

Tattoos are like your paintings and photos. The ink reacts to the sunlight, and breaks down faster with sun exposure. This is important to keep in mind for the life of your tattoo, but those first two weeks are critical to your overall tattoo retention.

If you get sunburned, you are exposing the tattoo ink to the sun and beginning the process of fading. And worse, you are causing direct damage to the cells that are supposed to hold your tattoo.

A damaged cell will be replaced with a new cell. With every transfer of tattoo ink from original cell to a new cell, some distortion takes place, and sometimes complete loss of the ink is possible. This is why old tattoos look faded and spread out in the skin. Prevent early aging of your skin by staying out of the sun as much as possible, and always using sunscreen on your tattoos after they are healed.

Do not apply sunscreen to a fresh tattoo. Sunscreen is not an aid to healing, and could irritate your skin enough to reject some tattoo ink. Better to just stay out of the sun for the critical two week period following your tattoo, and apply sunscreen after that.

Soaking your tattoo in the first two weeks can also result in loss of ink.

Think of a fresh burn, and how that damaged skin is so fragile. If you soak a fresh burn for any length of time, the damaged layers begin to rise off of the healthy skin and leave the healthy skin exposed.

The same principle applies to your tattoo. You have just damaged three layers of your skin. You want that third layer to heal with the ink successfully embedded in the skin cells. The last thing you want is to remove or dislodge those skin cells by being foolish.

So wash your tattoo with soapy water, but don’t soak the tattoo in a bath for a half hour, and definitely don’t go swimming for the day.

Imagine how much chlorine could hurt your tattoo! Chlorine acts as a bleach. It’s why pools stay so clean. But bleach = loss of color. Don’t lighten your tattoo by swimming in a chlorinated pool while the tattoo is still fresh and open. It’s a waste of your investment.

Lots of people will tell you that salt water is fine for your tattoo. And it probably is. Salt water can help heal wounds, for sure. But the rules of staying out of the sun and not soaking your tattoo for hours still apply. Try not to have a beach party in the days following your tattoo procedure. Besides, you wouldn’t want to have to remove sand from your tattoo, would you?

Lastly, don’t run out and use the products your tattoo artist specifically tells you NOT to use. We don’t tell you not to use coco butter because we have a vendetta against stretch mark lightening. It’s because coco butter is such a thick lotion that it clogs pores and reacts with your skin to remove foreign materials. Using coco butter will cause your tattoo to heal with significant loss of pigment.

Don’t use triple antibiotic or even bacitracin on your tattoo unless your doctor recommends it for you.

Even if you do, understand that using these products is very likely to cause your tattoo to heal with significant fading.

Antibiotics do too good of a job of healing you, and will remove a great deal of your tattoo ink from your skin. If you want a crisp and colorful, clear tattoo, stick to the aftercare products your tattoo artist recommends!
If you have more questions for us about the care of your tattoos, please leave us some comments below or shoot us an email, and we will be happy to answer your questions and concerns!