Sunburns and Tattoos: What You Need To Know Before Your Appointment

Of course, you know our shop is located in New Port Richey, Florida. Florida being the sunshine state you get a lot of sun whether you’re at the beach, by the pool, on the boat fishing, or just outside enjoying this beautiful weather. A lot of sun leads to sunburns, and even if you’re cautious it can sneak up on you. 

The question I get asked often is, can I get a tattoo if I’m sunburned? The simple answer is no, and here’s why. Whenever you get a sunburn the skin is already trying to heal itself. When we then add minor cuts and abrasions from a tattoo, it’s now challenging for the skin to heal the burn and the tattoo all at one time. If you’ve had a tattoo, you know that the healing process is extremely important for retention. Sunburn is a sign your body is already in overdrive to heal from UV overexposure. When we get a tattoo, we are implanting pigment into the skin and this process becomes more challenging for your artist to judge the proper shade, proper color saturation, not to mention more painful for you. There’s a lot of blood already at the surface of your skin being that blood is what carries everything to your body to heal itself so when you start shading and adding color it’s bleeding that much more. And that’s just your body doing it’s job, right? Protecting itself from pathogens, when the skin breaks it bleeds it forces out whatever is trying to get in, it’s flushing out the wound. But that is working against our goal of implanting pigment. This is something that occurs whether you’re sunburned or not but its compounded when you’re working with damaged skin that’s already in the healing process and has more blood at the surface.

So what can you do about sunburns? You have to take steps to protect yourself, especially before your tattoo appointment. Sunscreen is key, definitely you want to be using at least SPF 50 and make sure you’re following the directions. So many people forget to reapply sunscreen especially after they’ve been in the water or they’ve been sweating a lot or maybe you’ve just been out in the sun a long time. You can also wear protective gear like sun shirts and clothing that is UVA/UVB rated; I’m sure all you fishermen know what I’m talking about, so many fishing shirts now are pretty much all UVA/UVB rated to help protect against overexposure. 

Another thing is, if you’re on vacation or maybe you’re spending time with family who came into town enjoying their vacation here in Florida–set your appointment for the day before you end your vacation. This way you can enjoy going to the beach, getting into the water, going to the pool or water park–whatever the case may be, because remember once you get the tattoo there’s no going into any body of water (pool, river, spring, ocean, etc.) for at least 2 weeks or you risk getting an infection.

Hopefully this information helps you out this summer so you can have a great time making plans to take advantage of this gorgeous weather we have here in Florida and still enjoy getting tattooed in the process.