Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
4-2013
Abstract
This study examines the affect tattoos play on sexual attraction. Due to many health risks which accompany the tattooing process, those who get tattoos without having any negative health effects would thus have healthier immune systems. Over thousands of years of tattooing and sexual mating, humans may have evolved to prefer mates with tattoos due to the fact that body modification signals biological quality. Unique from other research which links sexual attraction and body modification, this study had undergraduate participants rate a series of photos of individuals who did and did not display a tattoo. While we hypothesized that participants would rate photographs of people with a tattoo higher than photographs of people without a tattoo, the study found that those who originally did not have a tattoo--whether a tattoo was displayed on them or not--were found to be significantly more attractive than those who originally did have a tattoo.
Recommended Citation
Delaney, Daniel J., "Tattoos and Sexual Attraction" (2013). Undergraduate Honors Theses. 74.
https://thekeep.eiu.edu/honors_theses/74
