Carly Ejogbamu, a 39-year-old mother of four from Sheffield, South Yorkshire, has faced relentless online abuse after sharing a selfie that revealed her extensive body art, including nine face tattoos. The comments, which she described as thousands in number, called her a 'freak' and suggested her children would be better off without her. Despite the vitriol, Carly says the experience has taught her children an important lesson about self-acceptance.
From wedding party to tattoo gun
Carly got her first tattoo six years ago after the end of a previous relationship and immediately fell in love with the process. Her first facial ink, a moon above her eyebrow, came in 2020. She then purchased her own tattoo gun kit for £300 instead of having a wedding party and began inking tributes to her husband, Aesop Ejogbamu, 40.
“We got married at the registry office and then came home and made dinner, it was such a normal day,” Carly told Talk to the Press. “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.”
Thousands of abusive comments
The trolling began after Carly posted a selfie with her husband, unaware that her Facebook profile was set to public. “I came back to my phone 20 minutes later and there were thousands of comments calling me ‘it’ and ‘a freak’,” she said. “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.”
She added: “I am thick skinned but if it was anybody else it could have really affected their mental health.” After the initial wave of abuse, Carly took a break from social media. “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.”
Using trolling to teach resilience
Now, Carly says she uses the comments to her advantage. “I started taking my selfies and captioning them just to trigger them,” she said. “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 and piercings, telling her that is how she should look. “It’s hilarious because even before the tattoos I didn’t look like that,” she said.
Carly’s husband and children, aged one, three, eight and 14, are supportive. “My husband loves my tattoos, and now I have covered him with tattoos too,” she said. “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.”
Role model for her daughter
Carly says her children are unaffected by the online abuse. “My kids are the most respectful kids you’ve ever met, and I never get any complaints about them,” she said. “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.”
She added: “I showed my eight-year-old what I looked like before the tattoos and he said I looked horrible.”
