The last thing you want is to find out after dropping hundreds of dollars on a wearable that it doesn’t work with your body. But this is a fairly common problem that people with wrist tattoos face after the advent of smart watches and fitness trackers. How countless messages on the device support pages and Reddit established over the years, tattooed skin and the sensors used in wearables often do not mix well.
One of the main problems that people face is related to the determination of heart rate. Wearable devices use a light-based method called photoplethysmography (PPG) to measure heart rate. It’s the green light you see when you turn the device over. But tattoos can interfere with this light, spoiling the readings. Another challenge is wrist detection, which also uses light to determine if the tracker is on a person’s wrist (along with the accelerometer and electrical sensors). Slap a fitness tracker on a wrist that’s covered in a tattoo, and the device may not register that it’s being worn at all, requiring the user to unlock the device every time they want to interact with it.
It may seem a bit silly that technology is quite advanced respond to gesture control and provide individual sleep training would be confused by a bit of pigment, but the tattoo problem isn’t just some baseless offense that consumers have latched onto. Device manufacturers have acknowledged this and have advised buyers not to place their trackers over tattoos.
“Tattoos (ink, pattern, saturation) can block the heart rate sensor’s light, causing inaccurate or missing readings.” Garmin notes on the support page. “For best performance, wear the watch on non-tattooed skin whenever possible.” Apple issued similar alerts going back to the release of the first Apple Watch.
Is there a solution?
Tattooed people have come up with all sorts of workarounds to get the most out of their smartwatches and fitness trackers, but none of them are perfect. The easiest? If the inside of your wrist isn’t tattooed (or at least has large areas of clear skin), you can place the device there instead of on the top of your wrist. Similarly, if the other wrist has no tattoos, wear the device on it. But if you’ve been used to wearing a watch on a certain wrist for years, changing it will feel pretty weird.
As a quick fix, some people to swear epoxy bottle cap stickers or layering pieces of clear tape, any of which are available located above the sensors and inexplicably fix the problem for many users. Reusable accessories designed to work in the same way have also met with some success. There’s also the option of using a chest strap if you just want accurate heart rate tracking — and if you don’t have any chest tattoos. Again, though, it’s not the most comfortable and convenient way to use wearables on a daily basis in most situations.
Ultimately, this will remain a problem until the sensors these watches and fitness trackers rely on are improved to account for skin changes like tattoo ink. Likewise, light-based sensors were discovered less reliable for people with dark skinemphasizing the need for greater diversity in research and development of this type of technology.
Anecdotally, it appears that Google Pixel Watch 4 could be much better in handling Tattooed skin than its predecessors. Were Samsung rumors introducing an update a few years ago to improve things in this area too, but the complaints are tattooed Galaxy Watch users b I suggest otherwise.
More research is needed
In theory, identifying the problem is the first step to solving it, but unfortunately, the reality is that the extent to which tattoos affect sensor readings varies from case to case. A research published in 2025 attempted to quantify the difference in readings of devices worn on tattooed versus non-tattooed skin, and although the former found imprecision, the results were mixed.
The researchers used Polar Verity Sense and an armband, having participants wear one device per tattoo plus one on the same arm in the non-tattoo area. Participants also wore a Polar H10 chest strap heart rate monitor to establish a baseline as this style of wear is considered more accurate. During the day, they were observed while they were at rest, walking at their own pace, and jogging.
It found that the presence of tattoos did affect heart rate readings, but that it depended on the wearer’s activity level, “with the greatest effect observed at rest and the variation decreasing as exercise intensity increased.” And in some cases, the researchers note, “the presence of a tattoo on the hand did not affect the measurement of the authenticity of the heart rate at all.” There are a number of variables that need to be taken into account—such as ink color, saturation, and depth—and as it stands, there hasn’t been enough research into the finer points of the problem to find a solution.
