The Appeal of “Get What You Get” Tattoos

Why people are letting gum ball machines choose what art gets inked into their skin. 

By Jessie Schiewe

Screenshot: Electric Anvil Tattoo/Vimeo

What should you do if you can't make a decision? 

There are a lot of tricks that can help you make a choice, such as meditating, drawing Venn diagrams, or playing “Eeny meeny miny moe.” 

But if you’re really having a hard time making up your mind, consider looking outside yourself for an answer. Ask someone to make the decision for you. Or just leave it entirely up to fate. 

That’s the thinking behind “Get What You Get” tattoos, a new trend in the tattoo scene that leaves the art one gets inked into their skin entirely up to chance. 

Instead of picking the design (referred to as “flash”) yourself, or having the tattoo artist select it, this method generally involves putting a token into an old vending machine and using whatever random sketch comes out of it as your newest piece of body art.

Though vintage gum ball machines are the most popular way of determining Get What You Get tattoos, some shops use wheels of fortune that customers must spin to select their art or cigar boxes with pieces of paper inside for customers to blindly rifle through. If you don’t like the design you’ve randomly chosen, most shops will let you take a do-over for an extra fee. 

“It’s like tattoo roulette,” Phil LaRocca, a tattooer at Elm Street Tattoo in Dallas, Texas, told CBS in 2017. “You leave it up to the tattoo Gods to decide which tattoo you’re going to get.”

While the tattoo Gods might be responsible for selecting your flash, it’s the tattoo shop itself that decides what images get put into the lot in the first place. Most of the designs are small-to-medium sized and available either in black-and-white or multi-colored. Placement of the tattoos tends to be limited to the arms and legs, with some shops refusing to ink them on specific spots, like the neck or hands. 

The art selection itself varies from shop to shop, but most of the flash tends to be irreverent, silly, or just plain classic. Think: a panther head, a butterfly, a dolphin in space, an 8-ball with a screw through its center, a skull and crossbones atop a heart, or a cartoon devil. 

Screenshot: Idle Hand SF/Vimeo

THE HISTORY OF GET WHAT YOU GET TATTOOS

If Get What You Get tattoos sound like a joke, they are — sort of. Faith Tattoo in Santa Rosa, California, is credited as being one of the first shops to start offering the unique tattooing method in the early aughts.

“Initially it was all original stuff, like dick monsters and pussy flowers, but folks weren't biting at that so much,” the shop’s co-owner Justin Shaw said in a blog post.

“So then we just drew fun stuff we wanted to do and mixed in old-timey flash, because that's what we wanted to improve on at that time.”

In the years since, the Get What You Get tattooing method has grown in popularity, with tattoo parlors across the country (in cities like Atlanta, Chicago, New York City, Fort Lauderdale, and San Francisco) adopting the unique premise and purchasing vending machines of their own. On Instagram, the hashtag “#GetWhatYouGetTattoo” has been applied to thousands of photos and videos of customers opening their pieces of paper and revealing the tattoo they just picked. Even comedians, like David Cross who played Tobias on Arrested Development, have found ways to work Get What You Get tattoos into their stand-up routines. 

Credit: Taylor St. Tattoo

WHY CHOOSE A GET WHAT YOU GET TATTOO ANYWAYS?

At least initially, it can be hard to understand the appeal of letting an up-cycled gum ball machine choose art that will be forever visible on your skin. 

“Personally, [I] think it’s ridiculous to get yourself permanently inked randomly,” a person on Reddit recently commented. 

“Why would you do this?” wrote someone else. 

But for most Get What You Get Tattoo customers, it’s not their first tattoo nor will it be their last. Some choose to get them to mark milestone moments, such as turning a decade older, while others opt to get them as souvenirs while traveling. 

Even newbies who don’t have a speck of ink on their skin have chosen to let chance choose their very first tattoo for them. 

“I think it helps people who are sort of timid or scared to put their foot in the water of tattoos,” Dallas-based LaRocca said.

Get What You Get Tattoos are also convenient if you want a tattoo but don’t have a particular design in mind or if you have too many. They can also be a fun bonding experience to go through with a friend or could be used as a very strange first date activity. 

Credit: Faith Tattoo/Yelp

For many, the decision to get a random tattoo is easy — and based largely on economics.

Compared to regular designs, Get What You Get tattoos are notorious for being lower cost and wallet-friendly. Most shops charge around $100 to select a design, and they tack on an extra $10-$20 if you don’t like what you’ve picked and want to select again. At Taylor St. Tattoo in Chicago, customers have the option of choosing between three different gum ball machines, each with a different price point ($60, $120, and $180).

“These designs are worth a lot more than the $100 minimum to play the game,” Josh Egnew, a tattooer at Electric Anvil Tattoo in Brooklyn, wrote on Yelp.

“We simply have the machine to create a fun time for the artists and clients. Fun is the only reason we are doing underpriced tattoos.” 

Credit: Reddit

ART FOR ART’S SAKE

The tattoo designs themselves are generally always original and used once, with shops replenishing their stashes on a weekly basis. Themed Get What You Get designs also occasionally happen. Around Halloween, shops like Inkbomb Tattoos in Arizona and Decorative Injections in Ohio fill their vending machines with spooky designs or Friday the 13th-inspired flash for customers to randomly pick from. 

In a world where few things are left to chance, where every purchase is informed by a rating or a review that someone left online, relinquishing one’s body art to the fates can be a freeing experience.

Get What You Get tattoos are a nod to the notion that not every tattoo has to have a sentimental significance or special meaning in order to justify having it inked on your skin. When you opt for one of these designs, it’s as if you’re giving yourself permission to be playful and erratic, to not take yourself so seriously, and to just let the cards fall where they may.

“When I look at my Get What You Get tattoos, they remind me that unexpected things in life can turn out to be beautiful,” a woman with two of them — a girl on her left ankle and a rose on her left thigh — told the blog Repeller.

“They remind me there are things in life I can’t control, and that’s okay.”

More OK Whatever: