Women, don't get a tattoo. That butterfly looks great on your breast when you're twenty or thirty, but when you get to seventy, it stretches into a condor.
-- Billy Elmer

Now that tattoos are really becoming part of mainstream culture, you often hear a lot of jokes about tattoo senior citizens and the like. And some people will say they won't get tattooed because they are afraid of what they will look like in 40 years. Let's take a realistic look at what happens to tattoos over time, and see what parts of the process can be managed and which parts are just up to nature.

One of the things that can't be changed about the entire process is that tattoos will age along with the skin, pure and simple. Just how your skin ages depends a lot on your personal genetics, but after that environmental and lifestyle factors have the greatest impact. Over time, skin tissue loses moisture and elasticity. In a tattoo, this produces a softening of both color and line. If a tattoo artist says the design should be larger, they aren't just trying to get more money, they are trying to craft a piece of permanent art that will still look good 30 years from now.

Exposure to sun and tanning are what will damage and age a tattoo the most over time, so just like fine art on paper, protecting your skin art from ultraviolet exposure greatly lessens damage over time. Finer details and shading are the bits that get effected the most, regardless of what else happens but intense sun exposure can really speed up any line or color decay. Blacks become more gray or blue-black with sun exposure and very light colors like whites and yellows can be burnt right out from bad sunburns.

Most of the jokes about tattoos and aging are centered around weight gain. I've seen some women who were pregnant and had tattoos on their torsos, and some came through the experience without any damage to their art and others found that the tattoos were pretty much ruined. The biggest issues with skin and weight seem to be rapidity of weight change and skin moisture.

Fast weight gain on skin that isn't well hydrated results in big stretch marks, on both thin and heavy people. Rapid weight loss without exercise and hydration makes for more sagging and bad texture as the skin tries to clear toxins released by the body fat. Part of how a tattoo will age will also depend on where the person carries their weight. Areas where the skin is more taut versus saggy or textured does better as do areas that have more muscle underneath the skin.

Bolder and larger pieces of work will hold up to changes without the line work softening as much visually. I'm sure some of the folks with the big tribal style pieces are going to find those look a lot the same over time versus the folks with fineline shading.

If you'd like to learn more on this topic, you might like
Spiritual Tattoo: A Cultural History of Tattooing, Piercing, Scarification, Branding, and Implants
by John A. Rush
The Tattoo History Source Book
by Steve Gilbert