Most people who sit in a tattoo chair expect a bit of a sting, maybe some swelling, and a few weeks of annoying flaking. What they generally do not expect is for their skin to turn a distinct shade of yellow.
Musician mgk (Colson Baker) has shared the extreme physical toll of his massive blackout tattoo, revealing that the process left him severely ill, jaundiced, and temporarily unable to move parts of his body.
If you have ever contemplated covering entire limbs in solid black ink, his story is a rather potent cautionary tale about why rushing heavy body modification is a terrible idea.
Ignoring the Two-Year Warning
When the artist initially unveiled the heavy ink work, it divided fans. The design effectively covers the vast majority of his arms, chest, and upper torso in solid black, leaving a cross shape and small windows showing through to his older tattoos.
It looks like a project that would take a considerable amount of time to execute safely. According to his tattoo artist, ROXX, it was supposed to.
Speaking with Billboard Canada, the musician admitted he was explicitly warned that a massive physiological undertaking like this should be spaced out over a two-year timeline. The body, after all, needs time to process and filter out massive volumes of heavy ink particles.
Instead, he insisted on pushing the entire project through in just two months.
“She warned me that it was going to be near impossible, even from a pain tolerance standpoint,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Yeah, we got two months.'”
The Physiological Backlash
Predictably, overloading the human body’s natural filtration systems with that much solid pigment in such a compressed timeframe triggered a massive systemic revolt.
The trouble escalated dramatically once the needles targeted the highly sensitive areas packed with lymph nodes around his shoulders and armpits.
“After the first week, we hit my lymph nodes around my armpits and shoulders, and I got really sick,” he explained.
The artist experienced a frightening array of symptoms:
- Jaundice: His skin noticeably turned yellow, a classic sign that the liver or broader lymphatic system is under severe distress.
- Sleep Deprivation: The sheer physical trauma and immune response left him unable to sleep.
- Loss of Mobility: The inflammation was so intense he temporarily lost the ability to move sections of his upper body.
Looking for Inspiration in the Trauma
Despite describing the ordeal on social media as “the most painful experience of my life,” the rocker maintains a remarkably positive spin on the self-inflicted medical crisis.
Rather than viewing it as a massive lapse in judgment, he claims the intense physical ordeal left him “extremely inspired” when he finally made it to the other side of the recovery process. The inspiration, he says, came from what he had to physically overcome to complete the piece.
While he might be proud of the resilience, the reality remains a stark reminder for the rest of us: tattoo artists give timeline recommendations for a reason. Pushing your body into temporary organ distress just to fast-track an aesthetic choice is rarely a gamble worth taking.
