Machine Gun Kelly has detailed the horrifying health scare he experienced after getting his giant blackout tattoo in 2024.
The rapper’s black body art spans his entire upper body, neck, torso and arms, and covers many of his previous tattoos. The most noticeable feature is a large cross-shaped outline across his chest, with vertical lines extending down his arms.
In a new interview with Billboard Canada, he reflected on getting the blackout tattoo design, saying his artist, Roxx, initially told him that it would take two years to complete. However, Kelly, 36, whose real name is Colson Baker, wanted it done in eight weeks.
“She warned me that it was going to be near impossible, even from a pain tolerance standpoint,” he said. “I said, ‘Yeah, we got two months.’”
With that in mind, Kelly chose to speed up the process by spending every morning at Roxx’s studio in Los Angeles.
“After the first week, we hit my lymph nodes around my armpits and shoulders, and I got really sick. My skin was turning yellow. I wasn’t able to sleep,” he continued. “I stopped being able to move certain parts of my upper body.”
Despite the physical pain he felt, Kelly said, “I came out the other side extremely inspired. Not just because of what I had done, but because of what I had to overcome.”
He said that before he got the “dark mode” tattoo, he was “looking for a change,” which “had to be something physical.” Kelly recalled looking in a mirror and seeing different tattoo designs on his body, prompting him to ask himself: “Who the f***? am I?”
“I saw death and drugs in all these patterns that I was literally writing on my body,” the “Bloody Valentine” singer, who has been open about his experience with substance abuse in the past, said. “There were happy tattoos, sad tattoos, holy tattoos, hellish tattoos. It was like my bipolarity was screaming off my skin.”
In April 2024, he shared an Instagram video about the process of getting the blackout tattoo, calling it “the most painful s*** I’ve ever experienced.” The clip showed him sitting in his hyperbolic oxygen chamber “to heal faster.”
He also opened up about why he chose that design during a 2025 episode of The Jennifer Hudson Show.
“You know the skin is the largest organ that we have,” Kelly said. “I’ve already had all tattoos since I was 13, my whole body has been covered for a long time, and I just wanted to redesign what the human skin could look like, so I came up with, well I didn’t, but a friend of mine named Roxx came up with this.”