Pete Davidson only wants to keep a handful of his infamous tattoos.
“I’ve been burning them off,” Davidson, 31, said during a Thursday, January 30, appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. “They’re almost all gone.”
The Saturday Night Live alum has since undergone multiple procedures to get the ink lasered off.
“It’s horrible,” he quipped of the pain. “They got to burn off a layer of skin and then it has to heal for, like, six to eight weeks and you can’t get in the sunlight and then you got to do it, like, 12 more times.”
Davidson once had “probably 200” tattoos that he started removing in 2021.
Pete Davidson during an interview on ‘The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon’. Todd Owyoung/NBC
“I was a sad boy,” he told host Jimmy Fallon. “It was a weird time. I don’t know, everyone was getting tattoos, like, five years ago. Post Malone was like, ‘Always tired,’ and I was like, ‘Me too, dude, I’m always tired.’”
While Davidson appears to regret most of his tattoos, there are a few he might end up keeping.
“Maybe, like, two or three,” he speculated on Thursday. “I’m trying to clean slate it [and] trying to be an adult.”
Nearly four years earlier, Davidson explained that he wanted to get rid of the ink to help his acting career.
“I honestly never thought that I would get the opportunity to act and I love it a lot,” he said on Late Night With Seth Meyers in May 2021. “You have to get there three hours earlier to cover all your tattoos, because for some reason, people in movies, they don’t have them that much.”
Pete Davidson walks the runway during the Alexander Wang Collection 1 fashion show at Rockefeller Center on May 31, 2019 in New York City. Steven Ferdman/WireImage
He added, “So now I’m burning them off, but burning them off is worse than getting them. Because not only are they, like, burning off your skin, but you’re wearing these big goggles, right? So you can’t see anything and the doctor’s in there with you.”
Davidson recently lent his voice to animated film Dog Man, where he plays “Petey the Cat” based on Dave Pilkey’s literary character of the same name.
“He’s the villain,” Davidson teased on the Tonight Show. “[Dave] does an amazing thing where it’s for kids, but he slips in all this heart and darkness and all that stuff. It’s a really tough thing to do for a movie like that.”
According to Davidson, he also “tried a bunch of things” to get Petey’s voice just right instead of an over-the-top impression.
