You don't have to be a hardcore vegan or vegetarian to be unnerved that there are dead animal bits in innocent-looking stuff like ...

There are products you expect to be made out of animals, like meat, milk, or those donkey gonad injections you bought on the internet (yes, everyone knows). In fact, you'd probably feel ripped off if you bought a regular burger and they gave you a tofu patty with twig cheese and compost bacon. As it turns out, you're much more likely to be in the opposite situation -- enjoying some everyday item, well, every day, completely unaware that it's actually made from formerly alive creatures that once blinked and farted.

6 Your Tattoo Ink Is Probably Made Of Incinerated Animal Bones

You only need to browse the veggie section at your local supermarket for a few minutes to notice that the Venn diagram between "avid vegetarian" and "tattoo enthusiast" is pretty close to a circle. Well, if you're against harming animals and never gave much thought to where that ink adorning your body came from, prepare to hate us (and yourself) upon reading the next paragraph. Or, if you're just the queasy type, you might wanna stop here anyway.

Alexas_Fotos/Pixabay

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This adorable pig marks your last chance to turn around.

You see, unless you went out of your way to get a vegan tattoo, that ink almost certainly contains the charred bones of dead animals. That's what gives it that crisp, appropriately death-metal-esque blackness. And that's not all: Animal fat is commonly used as an ink stabilizer, while gelatin made out of animal hooves serves as a binding agent. We're gonna go ahead and guess those hooves weren't volunteered by their original owners.

via Vegan Tattoos

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"Yeah, animal cruelty really gets under my skin, you know?"

Some inks use resin from shellac beetles for binding, which might be less horrible in the vegan/vegetarian sense, but is still skin-crawlingly gross. Fortunately, vegan tattoo inks do exist, but according to The Atlantic, "outside veggie hotspots like New York City, Portland, and Los Angeles, they can be hard to find." We're gonna assume all the cool kids with vegan tattoos knew this and carefully vetted their ink, lest they become a living, breathing example of irony.