Watch: MGK Reveals Blackout Tattoo Gave Him Illness That Turned His Skin Yellow
Machine Gun Kelly took the fast road in getting his blackout tattoo.
The “Loney Road” hitmaker shared he experienced a medical emergency after getting his dramatic ink in a matter of weeks, despite his tattoo artist ROXX advising him to complete the body art over the span of two years.
“She warned me that it was going to be near impossible, even from a pain tolerance standpoint,” MGK told Billboard Canada in an interview published June 8. “I said, ‘Yeah, we got two months.’”
“After the first week, we hit my lymph nodes around my armpits and shoulders, and I got really sick,” he added. “My skin was turning yellow. I wasn’t able to sleep. I stopped being able to move certain parts of my upper body.”
MGK (born Colson Baker) debuted his extreme new look in a 2024 Instagram post, captioning the snap, “for spiritual purposes only.”
He further elaborated on his decision to go under the needle in his track “Don’t Let Me Go.”
“Just like I wish they would understand me one time,” the Grammy nominee rapped. “I had a breakdown and tatted my entire body except one line.”
Indeed, MGK—dad to daughters Casie, 16, with ex Emma Cannon and Saga, 15 months, with ex Megan Fox—took on the striking body art to mark a new chapter in his life.
“I was looking for a change that wasn’t just a sound wave,” he continued to Billboard Canada. “It had to be something physical.”
Photo by: Theo Wargo/NBC via Getty Images
Though the “cliché” singer noted he didn’t “recognize himself” after getting the ink—which covers the majority of his upper body, including his previous tattoos—that’s an element he’s come to appreciate.
“I saw death and drugs in all these patterns that I was literally writing on my body,” he explained. “There were happy tattoos, sad tattoos, holy tattoos, hellish tattoos. It was like my bipolarity was screaming off my skin.”
And despite the toll the tattooing process took on his body, the 36-year-old noted that the physical pain had nothing on the experience’s emotional benefits.
“I came out the other side extremely inspired,” he explained. “Not just because of what I had done, but because of what I had to overcome.”
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