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Jelly Roll Reveals the 2 Percent of His Tattoos He Doesn’t Regret: I’d Get ‘Rid of Every Other Tattoo’
Jelly Roll recently revealed that he regrets “98 percent” of his tattoos. Now, he exclusively tells Life & Style which two percent of his body ink he is not sorry about.
“I’d keep the cross,” Jelly, 39, said on the red carpet of the iHeartCountry festival in Austin, Texas, on Saturday, May 4, while pointing to the right side of his face. “And I’d keep the ‘Music Man’ on my forehead. If I got rid of every other tattoo on my body, I’d keep those two.”
The “Son of a Sinner” artist previously revealed that the big cross on his right cheek is “probably the most meaningful” of his tattoos. “As cliché as it is,” he said during a March interview with GQ. “It was symbolic of a change in me. It was symbolic of kind of a new beginning.”
“Understanding that I need to bear my own cross. I need to carry my own cross as the Good Book says,” he continued. “That was kind of a constant reminder.”
During that same interview, Jelly – real name Jason DeFord – opened up about feeling remorseful of “almost all” of the tattoos on his body.
“Like core philosophies I rooted my life in when I was 17 and now that I’m 40, I’m like, what the f–k was I thinking?” he told GQ. “I hate them all, I don’t know where to start.”
Jelly went body part by body part picking apart his ink, first pointing to the “baby smoking the blunt” on his arm, calling it “a little excessive.”
“Maybe that was a little bit much,” he added. “A lot of these are cover-ups. The ones that were really bad have already been covered up.”
He then guided fans to a portrait of the Nashville skyline on the back of his neck, which he chose to cover up “Surviving the Struggle.” “We had forgot to put the T in it. So it said, ‘surviving the sruggle,’” he laughed.
While the two tatts that Jelly Roll claims he does not regret are located on his face, the “Need a Favor” artist told GQ that he does not remember which face ink came first.
“I know that’s probably strange to say, but there’s been so many now,” he continued.
Jelly later dished on the significance of the “Music Man” tattoo on his forehead, calling the ink “really important to me.”
“My wife has ‘Married to Music Man’ tattooed on her leg from the Elton John lyric,” he revealed. “I realized that almost all of my tattoos represent who I was, none of them represent who I am. And quite a few years ago, I looked at my wife and I was like, ‘I don’t want to be bound to these old tattoos anymore. I want them to be reflective of who I am.’”
