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If findings from recent research are anything to go by, the answer is yes.
Around 60 million Europeans have at least one tattoo. Personal ink is hardly the taboo it was a few decades ago, but that doesn’t mean it’s warmly welcomed in the workplace.
Dr Alyssa Grocutt spent several months researching tattoos, and found that employers are ‘still less likely’ to hire candidates with visible tattoos. Grocutt has hundreds of tattoos covering almost all of her body, and dedicated her PhD to exploring perceptions of tattoos in professional settings.
According to a recent YouGov poll, 40% of British 25-49 year-olds have at least one tattoo, and the upper arm is the most popular part of the body to get inked. Hardly a subtle location. Yet sociologist Dr Michael Rees says there’s still a big gulf in social acceptability between visible and non-visible tattoos.
Rees has both of his hands and neck tattooed, but admitted he waited until he got his first permanent job as an academic before getting the ink.
‘Even working in the career I work in, I was concerned that it may harm my job prospects,’ Rees told the BBC.
‘I think people getting tattooed in those areas are potentially restricting the careers they get into.’
Grocutt’s research also found that career impact depends on the industry and on how ‘intimidating’ the ink is deemed to be, e.g flowers versus skulls. Those with the latter were often deemed to be dangerous or aggressive, while those with the former were assumed to be creative and artistic individuals.
woman gets emotional after being hired by Walmart despite her face tattoos pic.twitter.com/UVaYpFzz1I
— FearBuck (@FearedBuck) February 24, 2025
And while two-thirds of people surveyed in the UK thought it was generally fine to show inked body parts, only 28% of respondents felt that way about face and neck tattoos.
‘Even 11 years ago, when I started getting tattooed, the hands, neck and face were called ‘job stoppers’, and a lot of artists wouldn’t tattoo people in those areas,’ Grocutt said.
These perceptions stem from longstanding stereotypes around tattoos, many of them based in racist and classist ideology.
Tattoos have been linked to criminal gangs, sailors and counter-cultural movements for centuries. But many communities have used tattooing as a sacred cultural tradition for much longer – such as ta moko, tribal motifs and religious script, particularly in Polynesia.
These practices have since been co-opted en-masse in the west, with tribal tattoos particularly popular in the 1990s.
A reddit thread exploring the origins of tattoo taboos highlighted this history, when a user asked ‘why did we ever decide that piercings and tattoos were unprofessional[?]’
‘I feel historically tattoos and piercings have originated from cultures of people of colour.’
Easily the worst tattoos I’ve seen on someone of her socioeconomic class https://t.co/KqcSAzrpGT
— Centrist Peater (@centristpeater) August 20, 2026
These associations have proved remarkably durable, even as tattooing itself has become mainstream.
If a workplace assumes tattoos are unprofessional, then people with tattoos are judged against a standard that was never designed with them in mind. The more people with visible tattoos are excluded from certain professions, the less likely those professions are to contain people with visible tattoos – and the more unusual their presence becomes.
