Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
The A.V. Club	favourable
Blender
Robert Christgau	A–
The Great Rock Discography	6/10
MusicHound	3/5
NME	6/10
Rolling Stone
The Rolling Stone Album Guide
Virgin Encyclopedia of Popular Music

Tattoo You is the 16th British and 18th American studio album by The Rolling Stones, released in 1981. The follow-up to Emotional Rescue (1980), the album is mostly composed of studio outtakes recorded during the 1970s, and contains one of the band's most well-known songs, "Start Me Up", which hit second place on the United States's Billboard singles charts.

The album proved to be both a critical and commercial success upon release, reaching the top of the Billboard charts, selling more than four million copies in the United States alone and over 8.5 million copies worldwide. It was also the final Rolling Stones album to reach the top position of the US charts, thus concluding the band's string of number-one albums there, dating back to 1971's Sticky Fingers. It is considered by many fans and critics to be the Rolling Stones' last classic album.

Tattoo You is an album primarily composed of outtakes from previous recording sessions, some dating back a decade, with new vocals and overdubs. Along with two new songs, the Rolling Stones put together this collection to have a new album to promote for their worldwide American Tour 1981/European Tour 1982 beginning that September. Guitarist Keith Richards commented in 1993:

"The thing with Tattoo You wasn't that we'd stopped writing new stuff, it was a question of time. We'd agreed we were going to go out on the road and we wanted to tour behind a record. There was no time to make a whole new album and make the start of the tour."

The album's associate producer, Chris Kimsey, who'd been associated with The Stones dating back to Sticky Fingers (1971) said "Tattoo You really came about because Mick [Jagger] and Keith were going through a period of not getting on. There was a need to have an album out, and I told everyone I could make an album from what I knew was still there." He began sifting through the band's vaults: "I spent three months going through (the recording tapes from) like the last four, five albums finding stuff that had been either forgotten about or at the time rejected. And then I presented it to the band and I said, 'Hey, look guys, you've got all this great stuff sitting in the can and it's great material, do something with it."

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