Dr. Kevin Dougherty was reviewing submissions for a class project in his SOC 1305 Introduction to Sociology course in 2016 when a pattern emerged.
The task was straightforward enough: Students were to take photos of tattoos they saw around campus and analyze them.
“Every day we’d start class with a photo of a tattoo, and I noticed that so many photos that students were submitting were religious,” said Dougherty, sociology professor at Baylor University. “And I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s amazing,’ because I grew up in a church where having a tattoo was like a mark of the Devil. Baylor students seemed to be using tattoos to express their faith in a way that prior generations did not do.”
The project, a lesson in the fundamentals, set the professor on a research path of his own. Dougherty recently co-authored a definitive new study exploring the intersection of tattoos and religion using nationally representative data.
About 10 percent of American adults have tattoos with religious or spiritual significance, according to “Religion, Tattoos, and Religious Tattoos: The Body as Sacred Subculture,” published this spring in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.
The study, co-authored with Texas Tech sociology professors Jerome Koch and Patricia Maloney, pulls data from the 2021 Baylor Religion Survey, which was administered by Gallup to a random sample of 1,248 adults in the U.S.
The collected answers to the 86-question survey shed kaleidoscopic light on six areas of respondents’ lives: health, COVID-19, life and community, culture, religious behaviors and attributes, and demographics.
Dougherty says the study, the first to snapshot the prevalence of religious tattoos, creates a baseline upon which researchers can track trends in the future.
“Three out of ten Americans today have a tattoo, so the number of tattoos is increasing, and now we have a benchmark to find out in five and ten years whether religious images and texts are becoming more prominent on tattooed people or not,” Dougherty said.
So, what are the biggest predictors of religious tattoos? One is generational, reflecting a broader difference among people of various ages who have tattoos of any kind. Among adults younger than 30 in the U.S., 41 percent have at least one tattoo. The number peaks in the 30-49 age group (46 percent), then drops for ages 50-64 (25 percent) and ages 65 and older (13 percent).
“Younger generations of religious people, they are using their body art to proclaim their faith in a way that mom and dad and grandma and grandpa didn’t,” Dougherty said.
The other indicator is the degree of religious commitment. While highly religious people are less likely to have a tattoo, people who do have spiritual tattoos have higher levels of devotion. These tattoo wearers invest in their religious identity with a visible, stigmatized symbol on their bodies — they “sacralize the profane,” as the study puts it.
“These are people who are really serious about their faith,” Dougherty said. “They’re not putting this mark on their body, you know, because it’s just something they thought about yesterday.”
In the class that inspired Dougherty’s research, students submitted roughly 2,000 photos of tattoos between 2016 and 2018. About 19 percent of submissions were religious or spiritual in nature: Doves, Jesus fish, and crosses of various styles, shapes, and sizes were common, as were less overtly religious symbols.
One student who had latitude and longitude coordinates on her forearm gave a surprising answer when asked about their meaning.
“She said, ‘This is the location of my childhood home where I saw my parents live out their faith and where, at the age of 14, I prayed to make Jesus my savior,’” Dougherty said. “That has powerful religious significance, and I would have never known that just by seeing those letters and numbers on her forearm. But every time she looks at it, she remembers that. So, every one of those stories is super powerful along those lines.”
Dougherty has co-authored previous studies on the topic with Dr. Koch and wishes to explore other aspects in the future. One of those is the placement of religious tattoos on the body. He distinguishes between tattoos on visible areas that the wearer can’t easily see, such as the shoulder, and those that seem oriented only for the wearer, such as the wrist.
“What we discovered was that religious tattoos were more likely than non-religious tattoos to be oriented in a way that was primarily for the owner,” he said. “So that made us realize that religious tattoos aren’t only a public proclamation of identity. They’re a personal reminder of identity.
“For me, the follow-up question is, okay, so for the person who gets that religious tattoo on their wrist — the two-dimensional cross or the reference to a passage of Scripture — does that make them more likely to live out their faith in a way that somebody without a religious tattoo might not? What are the long-term implications of having a tattoo in terms of your faith? Commitment to faith — is someone less likely to leave the faith because they’ve tattooed on their body a Bible verse than someone who doesn’t?”
Another tantalizing research question is the relationship between religious tattoos and regret.
“For about a quarter of Americans who have a tattoo, they regret their tattoo,” Dougherty said. “A guy might have gotten his girlfriend’s face tattooed on his shoulder when he was 19, and now he’s no longer with that significant other and he regrets that tattoo. Do people regret religious tattoos at the same percentage as they regret non-religious tattoos?”
The story behind Dougherty’s own tattoo reflects the generational trends captured in his study. He got an ichthus symbol, or Jesus fish, on his ankle in college at a time when no one else in his family was tattooed and the practice was considered deviant by his church.
“But I have three daughters, and this summer when my youngest daughter turned 18, she and her two sisters all got matching ichthus fish tattoos just like mine on their ankle near the same place,” he said. “So now, nearly all the members of my own family, the family that I created, except for my wife, all have matching tattoos.”
