Kelsea Ballerini’s Tattoos, Explained by the Singer Herself

Ballerini has the cursive script “How sweet the sound” inked horizontally on the inside of her left wrist. The text is an ode to “Amazing Grace,” the first solo song she performed in her church choir growing up, which largely inspired her passion for music. She chose this sentimental lyric as her first piece of ink and got it right before her first-ever photo shoot following the release of her 2014 debut single, “Love Me Like You Mean It.”

While speaking with Shape magazine in a 2021 story, she revealed the funny story behind how this meaningful, yet very impromptu, tattoo came to be. “The day before my first photo shoot, I panicked because I wanted a tattoo but didn’t have one yet,” she says. “And I was like, ‘What if this single works and people start to follow me?’ Then all of a sudden, I get a tattoo. People will be like, ‘She’s going off the deep end.'” To avoid that, she went to the tattoo parlor the day before the shoot. “It was just this youthfully innocent way of saying, ‘I’ve got to be who I am from the beginning of this.'”

Ina Bansal is a contributor at PS, where she writes for the Beauty vertical.

Renee Rodriguez is a staff writer and social producer for PS. She writes across all verticals, but her main areas of expertise focus on fashion and beauty content with an emphasis on reviews and editor experiments. She also produces social content for PS’s TikTok and Instagram accounts.