A mother with nine face tattoos says online trolls who call her a 'freak' are inadvertently teaching her children an important lesson about self-acceptance.
Carly Ejogbamu, 39, from Sheffield, South Yorkshire, has more than 120 tattoos, multiple piercings and lip fillers. She got her first tattoo six years ago after a previous relationship ended, and her first face ink — a moon above her eyebrow — in 2020. She later bought her own tattoo gun and began her body art journey.
Trolls called her a 'freak'
After posting a selfie alongside her husband Aesop Ejogbamu, 40, Carly received thousands of comments calling her a 'freak.' She said: 'I'm not a very technical person and didn't realise my Facebook profile was set to public, so I just shared a selfie of me and my husband. I came back to my phone 20 minutes later and there were thousands of comments calling me "it" and "a freak." There were comments saying how disgusting I am, how I'm mentally unwell, that my children need to be taken into care. It's all because I choose to look different.'
Carly spent £300 on the tattoo gun kit instead of having a wedding party and used it to ink tributes to her husband. She said: 'We got married at the registry office and then came home and made dinner, it was such a normal day. Instead of having a big party, I bought the gun. I have an A and 224 on my face for husband. 224 signified "today, tomorrow, forever", which is cheesy but I love it.'
Teaching kids to be themselves
After the first round of trolling, Carly took some time off social media. She told Talk to the Press: 'The first time it happened, I was arguing back with them in the comments but that just made it worse. It knocked my confidence a bit so I took a break and didn't really post for a while but I started back about four months ago. Now I use it. I started taking my selfies and captioning them just to trigger them. I've just had a new piercing on my face, a bridge, and I've captioned the picture "growing old gracefully".'
Some trolls have even used AI to generate images of her without tattoos. Carly said: 'I get people who have AI'd my face with the prompt of "take all the piercings and tattoos away" and then tell me that's how I should look. It's hilarious because even before the tattoos I didn't look like that.'
The mum is not deterred by the comments as her husband and children, aged one, three, eight and 14, love how she looks. She said: 'My husband loves my tattoos, and now I have covered him with tattoos too. He knows what I have been through before and how conservative I had to be, so now he just goes along with whatever I want which is a blessing. He is my biggest supporter and argues back with people in the comments but I leave him to do that.'
A role model for her daughter
Carly added: 'My kids are the most respectful kids you've ever met, and I never get any complaints about them. My daughter is 14 and is just starting to find her own style. She has a shaved head and puts patterns in it with hair dye. She's just finding herself, and it's good for her to have a role model. That's sort of why I've been doing this to teach her that it's okay to be who she wants. I showed my eight-year-old what I looked like before the tattoos and he said I looked horrible.'
