What if a tattoo could help you heal? Not just physically, but emotionally - restoring confidence, reclaiming identity, and transforming the way you see your own body.
In this episode of Newstalk Daily, Ciara Doherty speaks with Adam Daly, a researcher at Dublin City University and one of only three people worldwide studying therapeutic tattooing. Adam’s work explores how cancer survivors use tattoos as tools for healing, self-expression, and empowerment. The stories he shares are both moving and strikingly creative.
Adam himself has used tattoos to shape his own identity. Growing up in a DEIS school, he began inking his body as a teenager entering third-level education, adopting a persona that helped project confidence. His first tattoo was a small beating heart on his bicep, which moves when he flexes. Over time, his ink evolved from cartoon-like designs to more naturalistic floral motifs, each piece representing growth, change, and self-expression.
Through interviews with survivors and tattoo artists, Adam explains how tattoos can be reconstructive or decorative. Reconstructive tattoos, like 3D nipple tattoos post-mastectomy, restore body confidence and intimacy. Decorative tattoos, meanwhile, range from symbolic ribbons and dragons to eye-roll emojis, bicycles, hearts, and even a striking zipper revealing part of the brain to mark a tumour’s removal. Survivors describe how these designs help improve body image, return a sense of control, and even reignite feelings of confidence and sexiness. One woman chose a tattoo of a gun firing at the exact spot where her tumour had been, boldly reclaiming her body.
Adam likens our bodies to picture books — and therapeutic tattooing as the act of turning the page. The ink becomes a visual narrative, a way for survivors to write new chapters in their lives after cancer.
With warmth, curiosity, and humour, the podcast explores the broader cultural conversation around tattoos, discussing why society often misunderstands them. Far from rebellion, these tattoos are acts of restoration, resilience, and reclamation.
Listen now for a deeply personal, moving exploration of how ink can help survivors reclaim their bodies, rewrite their stories, and carry forward their identities - one tattoo at a time.
