MEI PANG

Mei Pang didn’t set out to make a bold statement when she started getting tattooed, she just wanted to get a cool tattoo. Nonetheless, the celebrated beauty influencer with more than 1.7 million TikTok followers ended up making an enormous impact with her unconventional artistic choices.

- DEVON PRESTON

“When I got my thigh tattoo, I just got the one and I walked out of the shop super psyched about it,” Pang says. “Then I got home and I felt a little bit lopsided. So the next day I actually booked the exact same tattoo mirrored on the other side. And my tattoos have been symmetrical ever since.”

From that point on, Pang began getting tattoos two by two—pairs of butterflies, panthers, centipedes, foo dogs and Dobermanns like a tattoo Noah’s Ark. As her tattoo collection grew, so did her following, and her comments were soon flooded with polarized opinions. “It’s usually a perfect 50/50 split down the middle,” Pang says. “There are people who are totally on board with it and some people who aren’t shading it, but they don’t see what the point is. I consider my tattoo artists to be my personal friends, and when I talked to other artists about doing my symmetrical thing they thought I was a bit crazy. They’d be like, ‘Oh, it’s a waste of real estate,’ or, ‘Why bother getting two things?’ So I’m glad I stuck with artists who trust the process along with me.”