Jelly Roll Regrets ‘98 Percent’ of His Tattoos: ‘I Hate ‘Em All’
Jelly Roll regrets “98 percent” of his tattoos. “I hate ‘em all,,” Jelly Roll, 40, told GQ while breaking down his body art via YouTube on Tuesday, March 12. The country crooner explained that he began his extensive ink collection at age 17 when he had a different set of “core philosophies.” “Now I’m 40, I’m like, ‘What the f—k was I thinking?’” Jelly Roll — whose real name is Jason Bradley DeFord — then gave the camera a glimpse of his ink featuring a baby smoking marijuana. “It was a little excessive,” he joked. “Maybe that was a little bit much.” See Celebs' Wildest and Craziest Tattoos of All Time Next, he showed the Nashville skyline that’s inked on the back of his neck. “I got this to cover up ‘Surviving the Struggle,’” he said. “We forgot to put the ‘t’ in it so it said ‘Surviving the Sruggle.’” “I don’t know if I really remember my first face tattoo. It’s probably the little cross,” Jelly Roll said, pointing at the symbol placed slightly below his left eye, beside a teardrop.
Jelly Roll regrets “98 percent” of his tattoos.
“I hate ‘em all,,” Jelly Roll, 40, told GQ while breaking down his body art via YouTube on Tuesday, March 12. The country crooner explained that he began his extensive ink collection at age 17 when he had a different set of “core philosophies.”
“Now I’m 40, I’m like, ‘What the f—k was I thinking?’”
Jelly Roll — whose real name is Jason Bradley DeFord — then gave the camera a glimpse of his ink featuring a baby smoking marijuana. “It was a little excessive,” he joked. “Maybe that was a little bit much.”
See Celebs' Wildest and Craziest Tattoos of All Time
Next, he showed the Nashville skyline that’s inked on the back of his neck. “I got this to cover up ‘Surviving the Struggle,’” he said. “We forgot to put the ‘t’ in it so it said ‘Surviving the Sruggle.’”
“I don’t know if I really remember my first face tattoo. It’s probably the little cross,” Jelly Roll said, pointing at the symbol placed slightly below his left eye, beside a teardrop. On the right side of his face, Jelly Roll has a larger cross, which he gushed is his “most meaningful tattoo.”
“It was symbolic of a kind of a new beginning,” he explained. “Understanding that I need to bear my own cross.”
Elsewhere on his face, the award-winning artist has a treble clef, a rose, “Music Man” and more. His first-ever tattoo was a Cross on his arm, which honored a woman in his town who died from AIDS.
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Jelly Roll also shared that “tons” of his tattoos were done in jail. (He was arrested at age 16 for aggravated robbery and again at 23 for drug dealing.) While he praised some inmates for being “really good” artists, Jelly Roll admitted he could only afford the “cheap” ones.
He hilariously went on to reveal the downside of getting inked in jail. One of his back tattoos featured Jesus Christ on a cross, but because an inmate used a stick-and-poke technique and not a stencil, his wife Bunnie Xo thought it was Elvis Presley at first.
“Almost all my tattoos represent who I was, almost none of them represent who I am,” he said.
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