Pennsylvania’s radical Democrat nominee for U.S. Senate, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, appears to have covered a forearm tattoo that read: “I WILL MAKE YOU HURT.”

Fetterman’s forearm tattoos are often prominently displayed below the rolled-up sleeves of one of his token Carhartt sweatshirts, but one tattoo he reportedly had while serving as mayor of Braddock is no longer visible. In 2009, Janet Reitman authored a profile on far-left Fetterman in Rolling Stone, headlighting his forearm tattoos at the top of the piece: 

Fetterman inked the [Braddock’s] ZIP code, 15104, on his left forearm. Since then, he has tattooed the dates of every mur­der committed in the town on the underside of his right arm. On the top of his forearm, in bold black letters, he inscribed the words I WILL MAKE YOU HURT. ‘That’s what it does to me,’ he says. ‘It’s very per­sonal.’ [Emphasis Added] 

By the time Fetterman launched his failed bid for U.S. Senate in the Keystone State in 2015, the “I WILL MAKE YOU HURT”  tattoo was gone and appeared to be covered with a completely filled-in rectangle. A WTAE video shared by CNN at the time shows Fetterman sporting the rectangle at the 1:04 mark in the video. 

The Fetterman campaign did not immediately respond to Breitbart News’s inquiry as to why and when the tattoo was covered up. Fetterman published a blog on medium.com in March 2021, in which he detailed his tattoos and the meaning associated with them. He did not include a single reference to the “I Will MAKE YOU HURT” tattoo. This fact, coupled with its covering, indicates it is not something the Democrat wants to advertise for one reason or another.

“I will make you hurt” is a song lyric in the popular 1994 Nine Inch Nails song “Hurt,” which makes allusions to suicide and intravenous drug use, as Genius notes. The verse that includes the lyrics is as follows:

And you could have it all

My empire of dirt

I will let you down 

I will make you hurt

While Fetterman, who served as Braddock’s mayor from 2006-2018, has inked the dates of the town’s murders on his arm, he has touted that under his watch, the locale with under 1,800 residents “went five and a half years… without a homicide.” He has claimed that he was “very successful in reducing” crime, but he oversaw a dwindling population and a substantial spike in violent crimes between 2013-2018, as Breitbart News reported.