During my spare time at work, I’ve been searching the web high and low for the most terrible, horrible, awful tattoos out there. I started a blog (awfultattoos.blogspot.com), realized I didn’t have enough time to update it daily, and have now moved to a snazzy new home at FV! To start off my posting here, I decided to do a retrospective of the best of the wost.

Bonus: Zombie Jesus tattoos are so common that they don’t make it into my top-10 list, but they deserve a special mention. I guess part of the whole allure of Jesus is that he’s a zombie, right? Filling in the eyes really would help to make him look more alive and less like he wants to eat brains, though.

10. Tattoos can be awful even if the tattoo artist did a decent job. People come up with all sorts of terrible ideas, and in my opinion, Kurt Halsey tattoos are way, way up there. Although I am by no means old or bitter, I am old enough and bitter enough to know that matching cutesy Kurt Halsey tattoos are a terrible, horrible, awful idea, and will almost surely be regretted a few years down the line. Unfortunately there are hundreds of these out there– cloyingly sweet little lines about kissing and holding hands, dozens and dozens of little tiny hearts around wobbly handwritten text, phrases like “we sparkle” and, my favorite, the following (which undoubtedly will be regretted a few years down the line when this poor soul breaks up with whoever-it-was):

9. This is an internet classic. The guy clearly has his priorities straight, and found a decent artist to give him this bizarre but amazing tattoo.

8. The skull bong that is so bad that I didn’t even realize it was a skull bong when I first saw it.

7. Wizard tattoos are my favorite category of bad tattoos. I have this weird soft spot for them, where I never think that they’re truly awful, just charming and endearing. I’ve been collecting different categories of wizard tattoos and finding patterns and similarities between them. Expect to see a lot of wizard tattoo posts from me. Below is one of my favorites.

6. Almost as good as wizard tattoos are fantasy montage tattoos. This one has a skull moon, a cliff, a couple castles, a unicorn, and planets! Planets in tattoo form are A++, especially when they’re hanging out with pine trees. He also has what looks like a wizard but he’s cut off at the top of the photo and you can’t see anything but a tip of beard and a wizened hand holding a staff. I wish we could see the whole thing.

5. Jabba the Hut and Slave Leia. Her hair is coming out of her face, her six pack is atrocious, her arms and hands look just like her braid of hair, her nose looks alien, and she has the weirdest shoulder I have ever seen. Jabba actually looks pretty decent, but then there’s the weird leafy neon background behind them.

4. Bike punx take note of this tribal ‘tramp stamp’ with a bike AND a shooting star, faded and leathery.

3. Metal/ biker tattoos are another of my favorite categories of tattoos. I love tattoos that are all crammed together and have a billion things going on and are super brutal (and I mean that seriously). Classic 80’s style metalhead tattoos are some of the coolest tattoos out there, but they also have a kind of folk art terribleness to them. The following tattoo, however, is beyond folksy-bad and is just plain terrible-bad. The hellhound-in-a-graveyard has a really wicked goatee, and the skull looking woefully upwards is a great bonus, as is the grass at the bottom.

2. Badly drawn portraits are possibly the worst thing you could do to a client if you are a tattoo artist, but they are also by far the most hilarious for bad tattoo voyeurs.

1. This is the winner of the best of the worst. It seems as though the guy decided having lame little flowers wasn’t cool enough for him, so he convinced someone to scribble over them and leave an uneven, blobby, scarred mess behind.