“You’ve got people that are perfect strangers that come off the street and open up to you. I feel like you have an opportunity to maybe change that person’s life in a way.” — Jon Boy, tattoo artist
In this week’s What’s The Point, we have the first audio edition of “Dear Mona” — FiveThirtyEight writer Mona Chalabi’s statsy advice column. The questions for Mona: How many Americans have tattoos, where on their bodies are those tattoos located, and how many people regret getting their tattoos? We examine the survey data around tattoos and what it says about the changing popularity of body art, and we discuss why it’s sometimes hard to get reliable information about questions like these. And we visit our local tattoo parlor.
Press play above to stream the full episode of What’s The Point with Mona Chalabi. Read her original tattoo column here, and check out some charts below about the data we discussed. The table is from a paper in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology.
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What’s The Point’s music was composed by Hrishikesh Hirway, host of the “Song Exploder” podcast. Download our theme music.