Advertisement

A Tattoo Artist Decodes Ben Affleck's Back Tattoo

Photo credit: Getty
Photo credit: Getty

From ELLE

If Solange attacking Jay-Z in an elevator at the Met Ball was our generation’s Zapruder film, then Ben Affleck’s enormous phoenix back tattoo is our blurry photo of Nessie.

Days after he and then-wife Jennifer Garner publicly announced their separation in summer 2015, paparazzi captured a first glimpse of a then-unidentifiable tattoo peeking out over the actor’s jeans. Five months later, the full-color, shoulders-to-waist phoenix was spotted through Affleck’s hospital-gown costume on the set of Live By Night. But the following March, the fifth (maybe sixth?)-worst Batman told Mario Lopez that the ink was “fake for a movie,” and that was that. Until it wasn’t. The tattoo was seen in the wild last weekend-almost exactly two years to the day after Affleck denied it was real on Extra-during a shirtless training session with Triple Frontier costars Oscar Isaac, Charlie Hunnam, and Garrett Hedlund on a Hawaiian beach.

Photo credit: SplashNews
Photo credit: SplashNews

To better understand the most notorious celebrity tattoo since “WINO FOREVER,” we turned to Michelle Myles. She’s the co-founder of Daredevil Tattoo, a shop (and tattoo history museum) on the border of the Lower East Side and Chinatown in Manhattan that celebrated its 20th anniversary last year. Myles herself has been tattooing since 1991, when the practice was still illegal in New York City.

First of all, she’s skeptical about People’s insider account of the making of Backfleck. “They had a huge tattoo machine at the house for days,” an anonymous source told the magazine. “It took hours and hours to finish.” That’s “ridiculous,” according to Myles. “They made it sound like you drive this, like, bulldozer into someone's house and stay for days. A big tattoo like that, it doesn't work like that,” she says. Instead, you should expect an involved, time-consuming process: First comes the outline, then shading, and an awful lot of healing. Myles recently completed a back piece of comparable size that took six months to finish. (Working backwards, Ben may very well have had a phoenix hiding under his batsuit while shooting his scenes in Suicide Squad in mid-2015.) Getting inked on your back, or anywhere on your torso, is going to be painful-most people can only tolerate sessions of roughly two hours at a time. "Definitely anything past four hours really sucks," she says.

Affleck has been widely roasted online for the retina-scorching tattoo, perceived as an inadvisably permanent reminder of the mid-life crisis and divorce that by virtually all accounts his own misbehavior-and possibly his fling with the family nanny-brought about. In a 2016 Vanity Fair cover story, Garner didn’t disguise her distaste for the piece. “You know what we would say in my hometown about that? ‘Bless his heart.’ A phoenix rising from the ashes. Am I the ashes in this scenario?” the actress said. “I take umbrage. I refuse to be the ashes.” Ex-fiancée Jennifer Lopez, more succinctly, called it “awful.” Even Affleck's longtime best friend Matt Damon didn't seem sold, noting only that "it's not one man's job to tell another man what he can do with his back."

But Myles, who, it should be noted, is a very nice person, sees Affleck’s ink in a more generous light. “A lot of times, people get tattoos to mark significant things in their life. It's almost like having a scrapbook,” she explains. “And it's not like he got the face of his ex, or anything negative. A phoenix is a pretty positive, iconic image.” The mythological creature, symbolizing fiery rebirth, is a reliably popular tattoo choice, although it remains to be seen whether Backfleck will cause a craze (or... the opposite of a craze?) for them. That said, Myles diplomatically declined to comment on whether or not she liked the tattoo personally, especially because that the identity of the artist responsible for it hasn’t yet been made public.

This speaks to Myles’ “pet peeve” about famous ink. “It seems like whenever you have a big to-do about some tattoo on a celebrity, it's never mentioned who the artist is,” she says. Myles has experienced this frustration firsthand, when a tattoo she gave Whoopi Goldberg garnered a great deal of attention on the Oscars red carpet in 2016 yet went largely unattributed in the media.

But even an expert tattooist can’t wrap her brain around how, or why, Affleck thought he’d get away with pretending the phoenix was a fake: “It seems like a weird thing to lie about, because it's not like it's gonna go away, you know?”

You Might Also Like