Permanent Souvenirs: Our Travel Tattoo Tales
Olivia Louden
You know a trip is worthwhile when that bittersweet thought crosses your mind: I wish I could bottle up this moment and keep it forever.
It’s the feeling that drives souvenir sales and fills up your photo albums, but for travelers who really want to keep those memories close, there’s another option — having that memory permanently added to your body.
Despite the discomfort of traveling with a fresh tattoo, getting inked on the road is a time-honored tradition. Captain Cook’s sailors are said to have returned home from Polynesia sporting some new body art. Even 700 years ago, religious pilgrims to the Middle Eastern Holy Land were getting small tattoos as evidence of their journey. By the 19th century, the list of folks with travel tattoos even included British royalty.
Nowadays, there’s an entire culture built up around travel tattoos. Some shops in touristy areas even depend on the demand. And just like in centuries past, there are still a myriad of motivations behind the decision.
During my (rather formative) few months in New Orleans, I realized I’d regret it forever if I didn’t leave that city with an inked reminder. Next thing I knew, I was face-down on a leather table, surrounded by NOLA-typical spiritual decor, while a stranger put me through excruciating pain for so long that I felt like my soul was leaving my body.
Unfortunately, in my case, that meant I was having a panic attack, desperately trying to keep still while hyperventilating and gasping through the pain. I tried to focus on a fixed point in the room to ground myself, but ended up locking eyes with a large, weeping statue of Santa Maria. It seemed less unnerving than the taxidermied animals, the bloody crucifixes, or the clutter of figurines stuck with nails or covered in bones and teeth.
When it was finally over, I paid the artist with shaking hands and basically ran out of the shop. I cannot even describe the headspace I was in. The relief was so strong that I felt like an entirely new person. All I wanted was a drink and a place to sit down.
Fortunately, that’s not a tall order in New Orleans — I popped over to Bourbon Street and entered the first bar I saw.
Midway through a whisky, while listening to a bartender’s story, I realized my new tattoo had started bleeding. There was a gruesome, oozy red smear running down my leg and trickling onto the floor of the bar.
“Sorry, could I just get a napkin?” I say, interrupting the bartender. “I’m bleeding onto your floor.”
She casually handed me a napkin without even pausing her story. She had no reaction at all to hearing a patron say they were bleeding onto the floor of her bar at 2pm on a Monday.
I guess that’s business as usual on Bourbon Street!
The tattoo has long since healed, but whenever I look at it, I remember what a wild time it was. I had no idea it would be that intense, but I’m honored to have been given such a distinctly NOLA experience — one that really embodies the chaotic excitement of my time in the city. It’s how I got hooked on travel tattoos!
So, as a person with so much access to well-seasoned travelers who understand the value of overseas memories, I just had to ask the Jack’s Flight Club staff and Community for a few more tales.
And I heard some great ones! Like the new tradition started by our reader Zoë and her wife, which started out as a space-saving measure:
“My wife and I have a tradition of getting a tattoo on every *far* trip. Makes the long haul flight home worth it… Wanting to collect ‘souvenirs’ whilst living in a small flat at the time was the original inspiration. We’ve collected them from Thailand, Bali, and Singapore so far. Many more on the travel wishlist.” - Zoë
Or our Jack’s Navigator Henry’s story, about a priceless memorial that only cost €15:
“When I was 19/20, I lived in Spain and became friends with a good group of people. I moved back when someone at home died, but while I was at home, one of my friends in Spain died (very tragic, I know). So when I came back to visit my friends, one of them mentioned that another guy was starting off as a tattoo artist, and he needed guinea pigs to get the business going, so I said I would volunteer one night we were out. So the next day, we went to Seville and got this done. It is of course the song of Liverpool Football Club. But the tattoo is actually for everyone who is no longer with us. The words of the song make more sense than whatever I will say here 
It took 3 hours and cost 15 euro.” - Henry
Our writer Akasha’s tales of stick n’ pokes in Central American hostels could probably fill an entire novel:
"After almost an hour with my face wedged in the crook of an old Maltese man’s pungent armpit as he bent over backwards attempting to tattoo my ribcage, eighteen-year-old me was hooked.
'For each country I visit, I’m going to get a tattoo to commemorate it,' I excitedly told my boyfriend at the time. He rolled his eyes. He was the typical Irish lad, one that would 'go on holidays' once every 5 years to Benidorm or Magaluf. Something about the Irish pubs there.
He probably didn’t expect that by my twenties, I’d be lying on a sagging mattress in the jungles of Guatemala, a Czech apprentice straddling my torso, carving her gun of pain into my arm for four hours without a break.
Or that I’d let a French guy hand-poke a reiki symbol onto my wrist in exchange for covering a bar shift.
Stick and poke became my preferred way. So naturally, my ears perked up when a German tattooist blew into the hostel I worked at in Chiapas. It’d take me a few weeks to propose a trade he simply couldn’t refuse: I’d bleach his dreadlocks in return for some artwork."
"This was probably my most painful one. Not from the needle but from the cup of rubbing alcohol he poured over my raw skin, and the violent slap that followed. A sick and twisted joke because it was midnight and I couldn’t scream without waking the hostel guests.
And while I haven’t managed to stay true to my promise of getting inked everywhere I’ve wandered, I’ve done a pretty good job of collecting permanent stamps.
Mostly, the ink I’ve gotten along the way is a map itself - of the girl who showed up clueless and curious, reckless and scared, but booked the ticket anyway." - Akasha
And lastly, our Detour queen Katy shared the story of her first tattoo, a remnant of a teenage adventure in the Netherlands:
"When I finished high school, I didn’t go on the big group trip clubbing in Ayia Napa. That wasn’t my thing at all. I wanted to see some of the world before starting university, not just the inside of a bar, surrounded by people I’d mostly never see again.
Instead, myself and some of my closest friends decided to go Interrailing around Europe for 5 weeks. As is common when leaving high school in Scotland, most of us were only 17 at the time. We couldn’t even (legally) drink in bars at home, so a month of European rules was exciting. And when we realised that we’d even be old enough to get tattooed in The Netherlands…
Well, let’s just say a few of us decided to give it a go — a fact my mum only found out three years later, when I was lazily lying in bed with my leg hanging out from under the sheets.
When getting your first tattoo, there’s a lot of pressure to make it meaningful, so I opted for something I knew would always be important to me — music. I was right, playing music is still part of my life. But perhaps more important is the fact that I got it while on a memorable adventure with people who are still part of my life." - Katy
When I look at all of these stories together, there’s a common thread: Most things in life are temporary. People enter and exit, chapters close, and that return flight is always rapidly approaching. I can go back to New Orleans, but I can’t go back to that trip. Travel, by definition, has to be ephemeral.
We might be staking our money, time, and energy on a very short-lived experience, but we often return home permanently changed. I think travel tattoos owe their prolonged popularity to that change — they can help make the outside match the inside.
So if you feel the same, and have a travel tattoo (or several) of your own, feel free to send them our way. Maybe you’ll see them in part two :-)