Jelly Roll recently starred in a Super Bowl ad for Uber Eats in which he “forgets” that he has tattoos all over his face and expresses dismay when he looks in the mirror and sees them. Turns out, that’s not too far from how he really feels about his ink.
Speaking to GQ, the “Need a Favor” artist says, “I regret 98% of these tattoos, 97, almost all of them. Like core philosophies are rooted in my life when I was 17 and now I’m 40, I’m like, ‘What the f*** was I thinking?’I hate them all.”
Jelly, born Jason DeFord, says he got his first tattoo — a cross on his arm in memory of a woman he knew who died — when he was 14. Then, he just kept on getting them. However, he says he could never afford the “good” tattoos; his tattoo of Jesus on the cross was so bad, he says, that when his wife saw it, she asked him why he had Elvis tattooed on his back.
Over the years, Jelly says, he’s had a lot of tattoos covered up, including one on his neck that said, “Surviving the Struggle,” which was misspelled as “Surviving the Sruggle.”
Among the most meaningful to him are the large cross on his cheek and the words “Music Man” on his forehead. His least favorite? He calls one showing a baby smoking a blunt “a little excessive.”
He says these days the only tattoos he’ll get are cover-ups or tattoos commemorating his concert tours.
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