Did Jeffrey Dahmer say he didn’t eat people with tattoos?

In August 2026, an online quote spread online claiming serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who ate the flesh of some of his victims, said he didn’t cannibalize people with tattoos because the ink tasted bad. The rumor spread on Instagram, Reddit and Facebook.

Snopes readers have been sending us this particular Dahmer anecdote for years. Some asked us to confirm whether Dahmer actually said, “I ate someone with a tattoo once. Made the meat taste like s***.” A post on Instagram stated Dahmer said that “tattoos taste terrible” and used it facetiously to encourage people to get tattoos and save themselves from cannibals.

(Instagram user @dark_grey_tattoo)

Snopes looked closely at interviews, FBI reports and documentaries detailing Dahmer’s crimes and found no evidence he ever made such a comment. We did find, however, that the claim is often posted by tattoo artists and studios as an advertisement encouraging people to get tattoos. Until we learn more, we will leave this claim as unproven. 

Dahmer killed 17 young men and boys over the course of 13 years. In 1992, he was convicted of murder and handed 15 consecutive life sentences in prison. Two years later, another inmate beat him to death.

In interviews with the news media and FBI agents, Dahmer spoke of eating his victim’s hearts, livers and thigh meat, and one time ate a bicep as a way of keeping them “a part of me.” FBI agent Robert Ressler interviewed Dahmer, who described his actions as a “perverse sexual practice.”

In 1993, Inside Edition conducted an interview with Dahmer while he was in prison. He didn’t say anything about tattoos. 

The Netflix documentary series “Conversations with a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes” shed more light on his inclinations. Interviews with law enforcement showed he liked certain body types and offered to take his victims’ photographs. In one instance he cut off and preserved a victim’s head and genitals. He also took photos of body parts of victims he liked. Dahmer described having sex with the insides of a person in his interview recordings with investigators. 

We were unable to find evidence that Dahmer confessed a preference for eating untattooed skin in any of those sources. 

Snopes has covered numerous claims about Dahmer, including the true story of how Milwaukee police returned a victim, Konerak Sinthasomphone, to Dahmer after accepting the serial killer’s explanation that the injured 14-year-old boy was his lover. 

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