You Can’t Judge a Book by Its Cover—But You’ll Do It Anyway: Misfiring Minds and the Myth of Tattoo Psychology
Sunday, June 29, 2025.
A new study out of the Journal of Research in Personality confirms what some tattooed folks have known since the first ink met skin: people are hilariously confident—and largely wrong—when they try to read your soul based on your sleeve.
Let’s start with the experiment.
The researchers corralled 274 tattooed adults (mostly women, mostly White, spanning 18 to 70) and asked them to complete the classic Big Five personality assessment.
Then, they took photographs of the participants’ tattoos and collected the stories behind them.
Meanwhile, 30 psychology-savvy raters were tasked with reviewing the tattoos—some with just the image, others with both image and personal meaning—and asked to assess the wearer’s personality.
And assess they did. Cheerful colors? Must be an agreeable person. Big bold designs? Clearly an extrovert. A skull with a serpent wrapped around it? Neurotic as hell.
These snap judgments weren’t just consistent—they were confidently consistent. Everyone was vibing the same way about each tattoo, nodding in unison like they’d cracked some secret personality code.
And they were wrong. Almost all of them.
Except for one stubborn, weird little exception: wacky tattoos.
You know the kind. A dancing banana. A grinning platypus holding a martini. A UFO abducting a slice of pizza.
These were the only tattoos where observer assumptions modestly aligned with reality. People with offbeat tattoos scored higher on openness to experience—a trait linked with curiosity, creativity, and a willingness to consider new perspectives (McCrae & Costa, 2008).
So what went wrong with all the other guesses?
Cue Validity vs. Cue Utilization: Or, Why We’re So Bad at This
The study used a framework called the lens model (Brunswik, 1956), which sounds fancy but boils down to this: Can people accurately use what they see (the “cues”) to infer what's true about another person?
Turns out, raters used cues—like tattoo size, theme, or brightness—that did not correlate with the actual traits of the tattooed themselves.
For traits like agreeableness, conscientiousness, or neuroticism, the gap between what observers thought and what was true wasn’t just wide—it was backwards in some cases.
For example, low-quality or death-themed tattoos were consistently read as signs of low agreeableness or high neuroticism. But these interpretations had no meaningful correlation with how the actual person described themselves.
The only reliable signal—again—was in the “eccentric” category, where quirky tattoo art vaguely matched an open, exploratory personality.
This supports earlier findings in personality research that warn against overreliance on aesthetic indicators. Gosling et al. (2002) showed that while we’re decent at inferring openness from bedrooms and playlists, we fumble when interpreting traits from visual style alone—especially across cultural lines or subcultural groups.
What About the Meaning Behind the Ink?
Surely if you tell someone the meaning behind your tattoo—"It’s a tribute to my grandmother" or "It symbolizes rebirth"—they’ll judge you more accurately, right?
Nope. Providing the backstory slightly improved rater agreement (a phenomenon called consensus), but it didn’t improve accuracy.
In other words, raters agreed more with each other, not more with reality.
This echoes earlier tattoo research that questioned the accuracy of stereotype-based judgments.
Swami and Furnham (2007) found that tattoos still activate biases, particularly around gender and risk.
Women with tattoos, for example, are often perceived as more promiscuous or rebellious—despite no supporting evidence in behavior.
In the current study, even professional psychologists with structured rubrics and detailed tattoo cues couldn’t reliably connect the dots. It's a bit like watching someone solve a jigsaw puzzle with mittens on: determined, confident, and mostly assembling a duck out of a picture of a tree.
The Bigger Ink Blot Test
If tattoos don’t reliably signal personality traits, why are people so confident they do?
The answer, it seems, lies in us—not in the ink. Tattoos operate like modern Rorschach tests. We project. We assume. We sort.
The brain loves shortcuts, and tattoos are a ripe canvas for story-building—especially when culture hands us the narrative scaffolding.
Some of that scaffolding is old and rusted.
For decades, tattoos were linked with deviance, incarceration, or nonconformity (Atkinson, 2003).
Even as tattoos have gone mainstream—now sported by nearly 30% of American adults (Pew Research Center, 2023)—those associations linger, often subconsciously. Research by Wohlrab et al. (2009) confirms that observers still associate tattoos with traits like risk-taking, despite those assumptions rarely matching reality.
The Limits of the Study (and of Our Eyes)
It’s worth noting that this study—like all studies—has its blind spots. The tattoo traits rated were fairly broad, and the raters were working in artificial conditions, without the benefit of body language, voice tone, or the surrounding context that might affect judgment in the wild.
The authors acknowledge this and suggest that future research may explore how storytelling, tone, and context shape perceptions more than just visual design.
Still, this was one of the first studies to formally test not just what we think tattoos say—but whether we’re right. And aside from “weird tattoo = maybe an open mind,” the answer is mostly no.
So What?
We’re meaning-making creatures. We want to believe we can decode people quickly and cleanly.
Tattoos seduce us into thinking we’ve glimpsed something deep.
But unless that tattoo says, “I scored a 52 on neuroticism and hate small talk,” odds are, you’re projecting more than detecting.
Tattoos don’t tell the whole story. Perhaps that’s the point.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Atkinson, M. (2003). Tattooed: The sociogenesis of a body art. University of Toronto Press.
Brunswik, E. (1956). Perception and the representative design of psychological experiments. University of California Press.
Gosling, S. D., Ko, S. J., Mannarelli, T., & Morris, M. E. (2002). A room with a cue: Judgments of personality based on offices and bedrooms. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82(3), 379–398. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.82.3.379
McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T., Jr. (2008). The five-factor theory of personality. In O. P. John, R. W. Robins, & L. A. Pervin (Eds.), Handbook of personality: Theory and research (3rd ed., pp. 159–181). Guilford Press.
Pew Research Center. (2023). The growing number of adults with tattoos. https://www.pewresearch.org
Swami, V., & Furnham, A. (2007). Unattractive, promiscuous and heavy drinkers: Perceptions of women with tattoos. Body Image, 4(4), 343–352. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bodyim.2007.06.005
Wohlrab, S., Fink, B., Kappeler, P. M., & Brewer, G. (2009). Perceptions of tattooed individuals: A review. Psychology, Health & Medicine, 14(5), 531–544. https://doi.org/10.1080/13548500903012892