A mother with nine face tattoos has revealed that trolls say her children would be better off without her. Carly Ejogbamu, 39, got her first tattoo six years ago after the end of a previous relationship and instantly loved it. She got her first face ink – a moon above her eyebrow – in 2020 and then bought her own tattoo gun and began her body art journey.
Abuse after posting selfie
She now has more than 120 tattoos, multiple piercings and lip fillers. After posting a selfie with her and her husband, Aesop, 40, Carly received thousands of comments calling her a “freak”.
Carly, from Sheffield, South Yorkshire, 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 my husband and me. 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. I've had people tell me that I should kill myself and that they would kill themselves if they looked like me. It’s all because I choose to look different. I am thick-skinned, but if it was anybody else it could have really affected their mental health.”
Tattoo gun instead of wedding party
Carly spent £300 on the tattoo gun kit instead of having a wedding party and inked tributes to her husband using it. She said: "We got married at the register 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."
After the first round of abuse, Carly said she took some time off social media. The stay-at-home mum 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’.”
AI used by trolls
Some trolls have even taken to using AI to come up with new ways to get at her. 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 isn’t deterred by the comments as her husband and kids, aged one, three, eight and 14, love them. 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. 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."
