Woman unable to bend arm after botched tattoo job

It was a cat-tat-strophe of elbow-stiffening proportions.

A UK woman was left unable to bend her own arm after a botched tattoo job caused her to contract a severe infection within 24 hours. A video detailing the backfired ink session has scared up nearly 25 million views on TikTok.

“Decided to brave a tattoo on my arm,” TikToker Leah Jones explained in the clip, which shows a compilation of photos from the “day after” she got her new body art.

The photos show how the floral, butterfly motif left her arm extremely blotchy and swollen with raised welts all along the tattoo like a fleshy architectural frieze. At one point, Jones demonstrates how the botched tat prevented her from extending her arm all the way out.

The Brit also posted a follow-up clip from several days later, in which she recalled how the festering body ink bled when she tried to pick up an object.

“I was unable to bend my arm, my hand has now swollen up,” explained the beleaguered ink recipient, who sent pics to her doctor after the wound “went all lumpy and started leaking.”

Jones said she was “given antibiotics,” which have allegedly helped alleviate her symptoms. In a video update from two weeks later, the patient demonstrated how her condition had improved substantially with noticeably decreased swelling and redness.

“It looks pretty faded to me, people are saying to me it’s just healing, but I do think it looks faded,” Jones explained in the clip. “You can see little blotchy bits — I don’t know if it’s red because it’s still sore, so I’m hoping after another week it’ll look better.”

She added, “I guess it could be worse, it still looks pretty, so I can’t exactly complain.”

Needless to say, many viewers blamed Jones for the botched ink job.

“Sounds to me like you didn’t research an artist,” one user wrote, while another snarked, ” ‘I’ve got a friend that does it cheaper’ ye and those are the results.”

Other commenters speculated that Jones had suffered an allergic reaction to the ink. “So this happened to me, I was allergic to the ink and my leg tat literally rejected,” said one sympathetic poster. “Mine looked exactly the same.”

“I have seen this before, it’s usually because the tattooist has pressed too deeply into the skin, have you shown the tattooist?” theorized another.

Cause of her condition notwithstanding, Jones says she’s “not sure whether I could deal with another tattoo after this.”

In a more serious cat-tat-strophe in 2017, a 31-year-old man died from a flesh-eating bacteria infection he allegedly contracted while swimming right after getting a tattoo.