is it unprofessional to get a tattoo on a work trip?

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager .
A reader writes:
Last week I had to travel for work. My boss lives in one state, I live in another, and we met in a major metropolitan area in a third state for three days of meetings. On the third day, Thursday, we carpooled from the hotel to the airport. We arrived about an hour before my bosses flight but 10 hours before mine.
About two hours into my wait, I was on Instagram and a tattoo artist I’ve loved for years and happens to be in the city I was in for my trip posted that they had an opening in an hour. I checked and I could Uber there in 20 minutes. The art I wanted was a small floral piece so I’d be back at the airport about three hours before my flight. I went ahead and did it.
A relevant detail: because of the sensitive data my company handles, we have very strict requirements on the types of work that can be done in public and the internet connections we use. Other than answering a few easy emails via my phone, there wasn’t any work I was going to do anyway and my boss was okay with me reading, scrolling the internet, or otherwise doing nothing to kill the time in the airport. I also did not expense my Uber costs to my company.
The next day on a conference call, my boss noticed a fresh tattoo on my forearm and asked about it because it clearly wasn’t there when he saw me just 24 hours prior. At this point, his tone was pretty friendly and more like “there’s no way I missed that, right?” I told him the chain of events that led to me getting the tattoo the day prior. He looked mad told me it was unprofessional. I apologized, mostly out of shock because I didn’t know how else to respond, and then he told me I should be glad I didn’t get written up.
It’s been a week and he’s still pissed (honestly it’s the best word to describe it) at my “flagrant unprofessionalism” (his phrasing).
It’s not that dramatic, right? I get that it’s a bit odd and I have no plans of making “I got a tattoo on a work trip” my go-to conversation starter, but his reaction seems over the top.
One coworker who witnessed it thought it might be a case of him making sure a younger newer employee wasn’t ignoring professional norms but I’m not sure what norms I ignored and while I am newer to the company (almost one year in) I’m not new to the workforce. I’m in my mid-30s and the boss in question is only a few years older than me. A friend thought maybe it had less to do with “tattoo on a work trip” and more to do with “tattoo on a woman” which would be on-brand for this person and his more … traditional … views.
I will say he hasn’t brought it up since and our interactions have been completely fine so maybe he had a bad day?
Yeah, this is ridiculous!
Your boss’s reaction is entirely out-of-line.
What you do in your own time while you’re traveling for work is none of your employer’s business as long as it’s not going to affect them in some way (like if you got so hungover you couldn’t focus on work the next day, or instigated a fight with a local competitor). Getting a tattoo on your own time shouldn’t even register.
Your boss might not like  tattoos, but that’s not in any way relevant to what he does and doesn’t have standing to intervene on as your manager. There are all sorts of things you might do on your own time while traveling that he might not approve of but which aren’t any of his business:  gambling , sleeping with a stranger , eating a sandwich that was left in your car all day, watching hours of trashy TV in your hotel room at night, and on and on. None of those give him any standing to threaten you with professional discipline.
If he brings it up again … well, in theory, you should be able to say, “Can you explain how me getting a tattoo at a time when I wasn’t expected to be working has anything to do with my professionalism?” … but whether or not it makes sense to bother getting into it with him depends on (a) the rest of your relationship with him and what you know about how he responds when challenged, (b) what other battles you might need to save capital for, and (c) your sense of how much it will really matter a month from now. If it’s going to have real consequences for you (like if he actually tried to write you up for it, which would be absurd), you’d need to address it more head-on (which could include looping in HR, who presumably/hopefully would shut him down, especially if you can argue it’s gender-based), but otherwise you might be better off just internally rolling your eyes and letting it go.
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