Jelly Roll is pretty well-known for his numerous tattoos, but it turns out the rapper-turned-country-star has some pretty deep regrets about the skin art. The “Save Me” singer recently sat down with GQ for a breakdown of his tattoos, confessing in a YouTube clip, “I hate ’em all,” and noting that he got the majority of them in his much younger years. “Now I’m 40, I’m like, ‘What the f— was I thinking?'”
Lamenting a couple of the more regrettable pieces, Jelly Roll pointed to a tattoo of a baby smoking marijuana, which he now understands is “a little excessive.” He also made note of a Nashville skyline tattoo, on the back of his neck, which covers up a misspelled phrase, “Surviving the Struggle,” by adding the missing ‘t’ so that it reads accurately.
Jelly Roll went on to address the tattoos on his face, which include a small cross under his left eye, as well as a teardrop, which he says he doesn’t clearly recall getting. On the opposite side of his face, the singer has a larger cross, which he finds to be more meaningful, as it symbolizes him beginning a new chapter in life.
While he has some tattoos that mean a lot to him, Jelly Roll also has just as many that, in hindsight, he likely would not get again, such as some he got during his time in jail. The Nashville native was arrested at 16 for aggravated robbery, and then again at 23 for dealing drugs.
Jelly Roll gave credit to his fellow inmates for their artistic talents but admitted that he got many of them because he could only afford “cheap” tattoos at the time.
Finally, Jelly Roll boiled down his body art to having a pretty big divide from his current state of mind. “Almost all my tattoos represent who I was,” he said, “almost none of them represent who I am.”