Ratting on tats
You might be surprised at who has some ink
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/04/2017 (3084 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
It’s not a stretch to say most obsessive sports fans wear their hearts on their sleeves.
But that doesn’t include Pittsburgh Penguins super-fan Phil Hammerstein, who wears his heart on his leg. And by “heart,” we mean a tattoo of his favourite player, Penguins right winger Phil Kessel, who was traded to Pittsburgh by the Toronto Maple Leafs in 2015 and went on to win the Stanley Cup with his new team.
With his team in the playoffs yet again, Hammerstein spent three hours in a Pittsburgh tattoo parlour this week getting his lower thigh inked with a 1950s-style pinup design showing Kessel riding a (wait for it… ) hotdog, clutching the Stanley Cup in one hand and a bottle of mustard in the other.
Seriously, a hotdog! Online news reports state the weenie is a mocking reference to a controversial newspaper column that claimed Kessel visited the same hotdog stand almost every afternoon during his time in Toronto.
Frankly, we are not surprised to learn a fanatical sports fan used body art to express his true love for his favourite hockey player, but it did inspire today’s surprisingly skin-deep list of the Top Five Famous People You Never Realized Had Tattoos:
5) The ink-stained wretch: Hollywood star Julia Roberts
The indelible body art: You can’t argue with the fact Julia Roberts is both famous and beautiful. In fact, on Wednesday, People magazine named the 49-year-old actress the World’s Most Beautiful Woman for a record fifth time. The Oscar-winning actress had previously claimed the cover spot in 2010, 2005, 2000 and 1991, a year after shooting to fame in the romantic comedy Pretty Woman. “I am very flattered,” Roberts chirped to the media of her most recent accolade, joking she’ll brag about her win to her film star buddy George Clooney, a double-winner of the magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive title.
“I’m going to mention that in my Christmas card to the Clooneys this year.” So who would mar such officially beautiful skin with tattoos? Well, it turns out Roberts would. In a 2014 appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, America’s Sweetheart dropped a celebrity bombshell — she has not one, but three tattoos.
Pressed as to whether she sported body art, the A-list actress with the squeaky clean image confessed, “Yes, I have a few. Aren’t you just rethinking me completely right now?” Ellen conceded she was shocked — “You are not who I thought you were, Julia,” the comedian joked — and pressed for details about the location of the tattoos.
“Well, some things I can tell you the answer to, and some things I’ll tell you later,” Roberts replied. That’s when she revealed the tattoos include all her children’s names — twins Hazel and Phinnaeus, 12, and Henry, 9 — and her husband Daniel Moder’s initials.
“Oh, you didn’t want to commit to his name?” Ellen joked. That prompted Roberts to laugh and reply, “Well, you know actually it was… we were brave or idiotic because it was before we got married.” Moder also got his wife’s initials tattooed on himself. OK, that we understand.
4) The ink-stained wretch: Former U.S. secretary of state George Shultz
The indelible body art: We had our sights set on big-name politicians for this spot in our list of famous tattooed hides. We’d planned to tell you none other than former British prime minister Winston Churchill sported a tattoo of an anchor on his forearm. We also wanted to reveal how one of the most iconic U.S. presidents in history, Teddy Roosevelt, wore a large family crest emblazoned on his chest.
But, after rooting around for hours on the Internet, it appears those tantalizing tattoo tales are apocryphal. Which is why we’re going to tell you about George P. Shultz, who held many senior government posts, but most famously was named the 60th U.S. secretary of state under president Ronald Reagan.
More importantly, this former political bigwig has a tiger tattooed on his… um… well, his posterior, so to speak. “Confirmation of the fact that Shultz’s posterior is decorated with a tiger tattoo came from his wife, Helena,” famed Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene wrote in 1987. “Mrs. Shultz informed reporters of the tattoo while aboard the secretary’s plane, which was on its way to China.”
It seems journalists had been aching to confirm rumours of the tiger tattoo, when Mrs. Shultz spilled the proverbial beans. “He got it at Princeton,” she said, referring to the Ivy League university whose mascot is a tiger. “When the children were young, they used to run up and touch it, and he would growl and they would run away.”
On the plane, a Time magazine correspondent asked Shultz about the tiger. “My gosh,” he replied. “I have been investigated by the FBI, the IRS, by the Senate Intelligence Committee. My mail is opened. I don’t have any secrets left. That’s the only thing I have left, what is on my rear end.”
3) The ink-stained wretch: Inventor Thomas Edison
The indelible body art: It is entirely possible Thomas Alva Edison, who has been hailed as America’s greatest inventor, is the father of modern tattooing. We’ll get to that in a minute, but first we need to talk about the great man’s own tattoo — a quincunx, which is four dots arranged in a square with a single dot in the middle, like the way the number five is portrayed on a dice cube.
It has different meanings in different cultures, including a fertility symbol, a reminder of sayings on how to treat women or police, standing alone in the world, or even a sign of time spent in prison. “It was inscribed on his right forearm,” notes the historical website EdisonMuckers.org. “The only catch is no one knows how the tattoo got there. There is no mention of it in the vast Edison archives. Did old Tom tattoo himself? We’ll never know.”
Which brings us to one of Edison’s lesser-known inventions — the electric pen, which he came up with in 1875. Driven by a small motor, the pen-like shaft had a reciprocating needle that made thousands of perforations on a wax stencil. The stencil was then popped in a press, and a roller forced ink through the holes, creating multiple copies.
According to the New York Historical Society, even though it is believed to be the first American electric-motor-powered device, the pen was largely a flop.
2) The ink-stained wretch: Barbie
The indelible body art: OK, we know what you are thinking: “Hey, what’s (bad word) Barbie doing on your list? She’s a doll, not a real person.” Well, try telling that to the more than one billion young girls who have considered Barbie their best plastic friend since she was introduced back in 1959. The tragic truth is, Barbie has been no stranger to controversy over the years.
For decades, toy giant Mattel has taken flak from parents who say the global pop-culture icon’s unrealistic body proportions — a waist the width of a grain of rice and appendages that resemble the nose cones on ballistic missiles — set a bad example for young girls. But slap a few tattoos on her plastic body and parents really start to see red. In 1999, Mattel’s Butterfly Art Barbie was pulled from shelves in the U.S. after parents complained by the thousands. In 2009, the company released Totally Stylin’ Tattoos Barbie, which came complete with removable sticker tattoos and a “tattoo gun” stamp.
There was a collaboration with Harley Davidson in 2008 wherein Barbie had a giant pair of wings tattooed on her back. In 2011, Mattel felt parental wrath again when it released a limited-edition Barbie doll designed by Tokidoki, a Japanese-inspired lifestyle brand, that featured the doll in a pale pink bob, metallic miniskirt, high heels and floral tattoos on her left arm, neck and chest.
The US$50 Barbie was targeted at older collectors, but that didn’t appease some concerned parents. Snorted one commenter on a website for parents of tween-age girls, “Encouraging children that tattoos are cool is wrong, wrong, wrong. Mattel, why not put a cigarette and a beer bottle in her hand while you’re at it!”
A cigarette and a beer? Hey, put a watermelon on her head and it could be Saskatchewan Roughriders Fan Barbie.
1) The ink-stained wretch: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
The indelible body art: There aren’t many world leaders who are willing to admit that, under their business clothes, their bodies are adorned with tattoos. Then again, there aren’t many world leaders with dreamy good looks that cause adult women — including this columnist’s spouse — to behave like teenagers attending a concert of their favourite boy band.
So our PM is on the cutting edge by sporting a serious tattoo — Earth inside a Haida raven — on his left shoulder. Justin Trudeau first tweeted his tattoo in 2012. “The globe I got when I was 23; the Robert Davidson raven for my 40th birthday,” he wrote.
The raven design was borrowed from Davidson, one of Canada’s top Haida artists. The Trudeau family were made honorary members of the Haida nation, indigenous to Canada’s Pacific Northwest, in 1976 during the second prime ministerial term of Justin’s father, Pierre. After his stunning 2015 election victory, the Haida were cool with our hunky PM’s indigenous ink.
But that changed after the Liberal government greenlit a liquid natural gas terminal in B.C. Approached by CanadianArt.ca in 2016, Davidson said: “Trudeau selected an image depicting one of the origin histories of the Haida Nation, where Raven brings light to the world. By selecting that image, he must uphold the responsibilities that come with that image.”
But his tattoo certainly made an impression on Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai, who addressed Parliament this month. “They say he’s the second-youngest prime minister in Canadian history,” the 19-year-old activist noted. “He does yoga. He has tattoos… When I was coming here, everyone was telling me, like, ‘Shake the prime minister’s hand and let us know how he looks in reality.’ “
Which seems to suggest tattoos are like everything else in the world — it all depends on your point of view.
doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca