All it takes is a quick Google search to find people looking for pain-free tattoos. While it’s hard to understand for most artists, there are people out there that don’t think the discomfort of being tattooed is a good thing. It would be great if you could just buy any product, throw a sign up in the shop window that said, “Pain Free Tattoos Here!” and go, but what makes a good numbing cream and do they work at all? Why Don’t Tattoo Artists Use Numbing Cream? A lot of tattoo artists refuse to use numbing creams or sprays during their sessions. There’s a few reasons, but most of them boil down to two: 1. They consider the pain of a tattoo part of the tradition and a rite of passage. 2. They’ve used numbing cream before and it didn’t work. There’s a huge part of the tattooed community that considers the pain part of the process of getting their ink. People this group tend to look at any irritation or pain they feel as just another part of their tattoo that makes it more meaningful. If you’re in this category it’s worth understanding that you will eventually get a client that has an ultra-low pain tolerance. It will happen. For these clients, the pain isn’t tolerable – but that doesn’t make their tattoo any less important to them. If you’re in the second group, it’s entirely possible that the numbing cream you used wasn’t great – but that doesn’t mean that all numbing creams are ineffective.