Tattooing the hip area can be a painful experience due to its boney surface and limited cushion of fat or muscle. Furthermore, one of the body’s largest nerves – the sciatic nerve – also runs right through this region. Besides knowing what’s coming next, soothing your nerves with engaging conversation or watching an entertaining show can help keep the pain out of your mind.
Burning Pain
Tattoos involve repeatedly penetrating your skin’s surface with needles coated in pigment, leading to repeated puncturing and subsequent burning pain sensations in areas with less fat and nerve endings, such as your head, hands, fingers, or wrists. Furthermore, this form of pain carries an increased risk of infection. Back pain tends to be less intense due to more muscle and fatty padding in this region, providing cushioning against needle impacts to bones and nerves. Before getting a tattoo done, you must understand where it will cause pain. Use our Tattoo Pain Chart to identify the most significant and minor pain areas while remembering that everyone’s discomfort tolerance varies accordingly.
Sharp or Stinging Pain
Tattooing often causes sharp or stinging pain when the needle pierces skin and muscle, like scratching a sunburn. This pain may escalate further when an artist uses different hands for shading and detail work. Remember that your pain threshold varies, and what bothers one may not bother the next. Furthermore, size and placement can affect how much a tattoo hurts; larger designs typically take more time under the needle and may include intricate detail resulting in increased pain levels. Tattoos on bones or thin skin tend to be more painful than those located over fat areas, including ankles, wrists, and ribs. Groin Tattoos are especially sensitive since there are so many nerve endings nearby.
Dull Pain
Dull pain is the most prevalent sensation associated with tattooing. This pain often feels like an ache that doesn’t intensify when an artist touches your skin with their gun. Sharp pain may indicate an injury or illness; however, a dull ache usually does not indicate serious bodily harm and should not be disregarded as chronic discomfort. Pain caused by overstraining muscles or tightness in tendons can arise anywhere on your body, from sitting all day at your desk with poor posture to suffering from trigeminal neuralgia (tic douloureux). Cynthia Boyd at Symmetry Health Center can assess to pinpoint its source and provide recommendations to ease it, such as lifestyle changes and treatments to bring relief.
Scratching Pain
Painful indentations on the skin caused by needles or claws scratching can feel irritated or prickly, often encountered when performing intricate work that requires more extended hands-on similar areas. Tattooing should generally be least painful when applied in areas well padded with fat, with thick skin and few nerve endings – the back, hips, arms, and thighs are often appropriate candidates; however, ribs may be especially sensitive due to being close to bones with thin skin. Numbing cream may significantly alleviate or eliminate the pain of getting a tattoo for some, while others find that it only dulls it. Your choice of artist and placement of the tattoo can also significantly affect its intensity; more experienced artists often have more sensitive hands that use less pressure when applying ink. Finally, where you choose to have it applied could play an enormous role.
