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There are a lot of ways to make guys like you: laugh at their jokes, flirt with them, be your awesome self and naturally attract a dude who’s right for you. And now with the results of a recent study, we can add one more thing onto the list… get a tattoo?

According to a new study, guys may be more attracted to girls who have tattoos. Or, at least, they find girls with tattoos to be more approachable than girls who don’t have tattoos. So could your tattoo snag you a date with the cutest guy in your school? Apparently, that’s a possibility.

Researchers did a few experiments to test out their theory. First, they found 11 college-age women who 31 guys had rated as attractive. They had those women go to a beach in France alone 20 times to lay on a towel in a red bikini. Half of the time, each woman wore a large temporary but realistic tattoo on their lower back. They found that men were more likely to approach and talk to the women when they had the tattoo on their back.

The second part of the experiment also involved a beach and women wearing temporary tattoos. While the women wearing red bikinis hung out on the beach, researchers approached 440 men in their early twenties to ask them three questions about a “random” woman on the beach (it was always the girl in the red bikini, FYI). Researchers asked the guys what they thought the likelihood was of the girl saying yes to a date with him and of having sex on the first date. They also asked the guys to rate the girl’s attractiveness. They discovered that the guys thought the women wearing tattoos were not only more likely to go out on a date with them, but also that they were more likely to have sex with him on the first date.

To sum it up quickly, these were the findings: men find women with tattoos more approachable and they also think women with tattoos are more likely to be open to going out on dates and have sex faster than women without tattoos.

I found these results pretty interesting, so I asked a few of my guy friends what they thought about girls with tattoos. While one dude said he didn’t think tattoos mattered, the rest made it clear that they thought girls with tattoos would be more, um, open to sexual experiences. 

But why?! I don’t understand how having a tattoo can lead a guy to make a snap judgement about a person’s personality. Does this maybe have anything to do with the tramp stamp attitude Caitlin wrote about last week? After all, the girls in this experiment did show off their tattoos on their lower backs.

Is this a reason to run out and get a tattoo yourself? Um, absolutely not. The only reason you should ever get a tattoo is because YOU want it, because tattoos are permanent. Also, do you really want a dude to ask you out just because he noticed your tattoo and thinks you’re more likely to sleep with him right away? Didn’t think so. 

In general, this study kind of annoyed me. I’m pretty sick of people making judgements about others just because of tattoos. I don’t have any myself, but I have friends who do and I see the way others react to their tats. It’s silly – tattoos can have deep, sentimental meaning (that doesn’t mean all of them do, but you get it). When a girl gets a tattoo, it shouldn’t be the equivalent of branding yourself with a sticker that says, “Hey, I’ll have sex with you!” You know what I mean?

Do you have tattoos? Do you notice that guys treat you differently than girls who don’t have tattoos? What do you think about this study? Tell me in the comments!

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