A woman claims she can’t secure a job after her tattoo “addiction” took over her body.
Covered in head-to-toe ink, Melissa Sloan, 45, from Wales has “lost count” of how many pieces of body art she has, saying she even covers up old tattoos with new ones due to a lack of bodily real estate.
“I’ve got too many tattoos now, too many to count. I’ve gone over ones I’ve already had,” she told the Mirror. “I’ll never stop, I tattooed over them because I’d ran out of space.”
Her passion for tattoos has soiled her career prospects, as many jobs “won’t have” her. While she’s cleaned toilets before, it didn’t last very long, but she would gladly “go and work” if someone offered her a position.
“I can’t get a job. They won’t have me. I applied for a job cleaning toilets where I live and they won’t have me because of my tattoos,” she said. “But, if someone offered me a job tomorrow I would go and work — I would take that offer. I expected this in life, I can’t fit in with people as I like to be me and I’m always going to be myself.”
Her tattoos, she explained, are her way of coping with abuse she alleged was at the hands of her older brother, Gavin Sloan, who was recently imprisoned for sexual assaults and rapes against children.
Sloan claims Gavin, who is her half-brother, touched her “down below in the bath” when the pair were 6 and 7 respectively.
“I told my mum but we were both small children and she brushed it off. She didn’t really believe me,” she said. “But it carried on and it got worse when I was in my teens. Gavin and I shared a bedroom, and he took every chance he could to grope me, and he tried to make me perform sexual acts on him. He drilled a small hole in the bathroom door to spy on me.”
While she grew up thinking it was “normal” — which was further enforced by Gavin’s sickening reassurance — she eventually reported the behavior to the police, who she claims didn’t take her seriously.
“He called me sexual names and made inappropriate comments. I saw him kill birds and small animals and I was very frightened of him,” she said.
“My tattoos help me cover the emotional scars that Gavin left behind,” she added, saying she’s pleased he’s behind bars. “They’re my mask and I hide from the world behind them. But now that he is finally in jail, I can begin to feel free.”
After suffering much of her life due to her mistreatment, she covered her “entire body” with tattoos in an attempt to “blot out the memories.”
Her collection of hundreds of tattoos have gotten so outrageous to people that they call her “Crazy Melissa,” although she doesn’t feel crazy at all.
“People call me Crazy Melissa, but I just feel like Melissa — that’s who I am,” she said. “If they don’t like it, they don’t have to look at me — I take no notice. There are some judgmental people out there, they judge you whatever. People stare at me, you get used to it.”
She’s begun to forget what her appearance looked like prior to the excessive inking.
She has flowers and butterflies on her face, but she’s always in the market for more.
“I go with the flow, whatever I like I put on my face. I go with the inspiration,” she said. “There’s space left so I’ll put it on. It’s free, I do it myself — or my boyfriend does it, he’s been trained to do it — he’s been doing it for years.”
Much of her ink is now “prison-style,” as she describes it, done at-home by her boyfriend, which cuts down on the cost. While the average price for a tattoo in the US is over $200 — and in the UK, it isn’t much cheaper — Melissa only pays a few bucks for a piece that might cost more than $70.
“I get adrenaline from it, I get a buzz, and I feel brilliant, then it wears off again in a couple of days’ time and I do it again,” she continued.
She’s slated to get a crucifix under her right eye soon, despite not being religious.
“I don’t know if I’m religious, I just like crosses,” she admitted. “I usually go for hearts or roses, but now I’ll get crosses for a bit.”
