50 Cent removed his tattoos to avoid spending hours covering them up before shooting movies.

The Candy Shop hitmaker got fed up with having to arrive on set "four hours" before everyone else and got to the point where he felt it was time to free his body from his body art.

Recalling his time on the set of teen flick Twelve, he said: "When I started working on Twelve, I removed some tattoos. The call time they were giving me for covering tattoos was four hours before everyone else's call time. So, if everyone is getting there for 6 a.m., I'm there at 2 a.m. So I was like, 'Oh man, hold up.' "

The rapper - whose real name is Curtis Jackson - has no tattoos on show in his scenes of his current movie Southpaw, in which he stars alongside Jake Gyllenhaal and Rachel McAdams.

Meanwhile, the 40-year-old star has said he isn't fazed by ageing as he believes "hip-hop culture is the sound of youth".

He told Shortlist magazine: "It's not like I'm getting older and you ain't. I've diversified, I've done different things to challenge myself and it doesn't affect me. Hip-hop culture is the sound of youth."