Jelly Roll Talks Face Tattoos, Weight Loss, and Reclaiming His Life

Jelly Roll is undeniably a storyteller. But before he even opens his mouth to share the vulnerable stories of his life through song, people notice his face and the tattoos that offer a glimpse into his past world. Looking back, he says that the ink reflects the judgments and assumptions he’s faced throughout his life.

Now that he’s a mega country star and has lost nearly 300 pounds, it’s clear that Jelly Roll is not the same person he once was when he got a cross under his right eye, teardrops, the music man across his hairline and more while incarcerated. While many could see these pieces of artwork and think he’s trying to get attention, Jelly Roll sets the record straight saying, “It’s the polar opposite.”

He goes on to explain to Men’s Health, “The way shame sometimes shows itself is not always the way we expect it to be. We think shame is somebody in the streets on their knees, with their head down. But shame sometimes is pride. Sometimes shame is just bravado. Behind real bravado, I can normally find shame. I can normally find guilt. I can normally find insecurity. I was the biggest, the loudest, the toughest, the meanest, the growliest, the fattest. There’s normally deep inside of that a really, really small, insecure human. I was that, for sure. Then a by-product of that was I got fat as fu**.”

Even though the majority of these tattoos represent a lower point for him, the “Son of a Sinner” singer revealed that some lighter memories are also attached to them. During an appearance on Taste of Country Nights, he shared a story about when his daughter was in kindergarten and her friends were fascinated by his face art.

In a attempt to sheild them from the real stories behind the tattoos, he told them a white lie.

“When she was in kindergarten it was so funny because all of her little friends would go ‘What is all that stuff on your face?’” he recalled. “I would go ‘You won’t believe this, I only draw this on when I come see y’all so y’all are excited about it.’”

Eventually, the kids caught on and began to question how he was able to keep this up this routine so perfectly.

“Finally, they were like ‘how do you draw it on the same way every time?’ I said ‘I got the little sticker things now because I been coming so much.’”

Jelly Roll also started to noticed that some parents hesitated to let their kids over to his home, making judgments based solely on his tattoos. This was a small but real-life example of how the world has constantly made assumptions about the singer/songwriter based on his appearance.

With the new chapter he’s reached in his life and the commendable strides he has made along the way, the Tennessee native admits he’s considered removing some of the tattoos entirely. However, he also knows that every piece of ink he has is a part of his story and shows just how far he’s come.

These might be a look into his past, but his recent weight loss reveals the path he’s carving out for his future. His journey to this point hasn’t been easy. Because of the time and effort he’s put in, he’s dropped from over 500 pounds to nearly 250 as of January 2026.

At the start of his fight to reclaim his health, the singer/songwriter admittedly tried weight-loss medication for only two weeks before realizing that wasn’t the solution for him. So instead, he looked internally and started by trying to solve the problem from the inside out with the help of a therapist.

“Even before I got into getting my blood work done, I went and got mental health therapy about my overeating. I started treating my food addiction like what it was: an addiction. Why did I treat cocaine a certain way? I went to meetings for cocaine and found a sponsor and detoxed off of it and shit myself and went through real hard life-changing emotional choices to get off cocaine and codeine,” he says. “I didn’t look at the food addiction different. Once I started treating food like an addiction, it started changing everything for me. When I started really looking at the source of why I was eating. What was I eating for?”

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From there, he did a blood panel which revealed he had “super high” insulin levels, abnormally low testosterone levels, and high cholesterol.

 “The first couple of blood panels were like, how are you alive?” he shared with the magazine.

Jelly Roll decided he was done feeling “never-ending sadness” while being a “prisoner” in his own body. Every day tasks from going to the bathroom, to bathing, driving and more were a real struggle and he determined it was no way to live.

“Every decision I made in life had to be based on my weight. If it could hold me, facilitate me, or fit me—people don’t think about every facet of ‘I still want to be able to do that and I can’t.’ I was so inspired by that kind of stuff.”

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Between hiring a chef and sports nutritionist named Ian Larios and focusing on his workout routine, Jelly Roll started to consistently lose between 9 and 15 pounds each month. 

He has already come so far, but Jelly Roll’s story is far from finished. In fact, with his health getting under control and his music soaring to new heights, he’s proving that the past doesn’t define you and that change is possible, no matter where you start.