Tattoos hurt. In more ways than you might imagine.
Machine Gun Kelly’s skin turned yellow. He couldn’t sleep. He lost movement in parts of his upper body. The cause was the solid black ink now covering most of his torso and arms, a piece he calls his blackout.
Colson Baker, the 36-year-old musician who performs as Machine Gun Kelly, told Billboard Canada he wanted “something physical,” not another sound wave. His artist, Roxx, designed the work as “dark mode” and said it should take about 2 years. He insisted on roughly 2 months, showing up almost daily without giving his skin time to recover.
By the end of week one, sessions over his lymph nodes around his armpits and shoulders had made him sick. The yellowing, the sleeplessness, and the lost mobility followed.
What he’s describing tracks with known tattoo risks at the extreme end. Ink particles can migrate into the lymph nodes and trigger swelling and prolonged immune activity, and recent studies have found that pigment keeps immune cells working overtime long after a session ends. Heavy ink loads packed into a short window, with no time for the skin to heal between sessions, stack those risks on top of each other.
Public celebrity cases this severe are rare. The closest recent parallel is Yankees pitcher Aroldis Chapman, who developed a serious bacterial infection about a week after getting a calf tattoo of his sister in 2022. He landed on the Injured List for roughly 15 days with swelling, fever, and pain he called “scary.” Most famous tattoo stories are about regret and laser removal, not getting sick mid-process.
He first unveiled the all-black chest piece on Instagram in February 2024 and said it took 44 needles. “For spiritual purposes only,” he wrote. His older tattoos still show through in panels, and a cross sits in negative space on his chest. Roxx called him the toughest client she’s ever had. Her caption when the first phase was done: “Made some art with @machinegunkelly Never met a tougher one.” He replied, “thanks for the joy and the pain.”
He says the decision came from looking at what was already on his skin. The blackout arrived alongside Blog Era Boyz, the mixtape he released with Wiz Khalifa in May 2026. “I saw death and drugs in all these patterns that I was literally writing on my body. There were happy tattoos, sad tattoos, holy tattoos, hellish tattoos. It was like my bipolarity was screaming off my skin.”
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