The web has scads of pages pertaining to bad sports tattoos. There are so, so many, after all.
Just search “bad sports tattoos” and you can spend an afternoon paging through them.
It has been suggested that an athlete probably should have a better idea for a tattoo than his own name, which often is Tattoo No. 1. It seems to suggest an athlete forgets his or her name, from time to time.
Athletes may not want to advertise that.
I am of the retro opinion that no one should get tattoos unless 1) it is a cultural thing (you are Polynesian) or 2) you have been in someone’s navy.
For sports people who go the ink route … it’s just pretty much permanent self-mutilation that you put on display whenever you play a game, and is most notable in the sports of basketball and soccer.
We were informed of another really silly sports tattoo the other day, and the explanation of it apparently goes back to this story, from a publication in Watford, England.
In short, a soccer player named Jose Holebas has “Don’t care” tattooed on the back of his hands — which was not what he intended. Or so he says.
His intention?
According to the story at WD Sport, he meant to have the message “Don’t hate care love” on his knuckles. Four, four-letter words. “Don’t” and “hate” on his right hand, “care” and “love” on his left.
(All capitals, apparently without the apostrophe in DON’T, or it appears to be so in this photo. So add “grammatically incorrect” to the misadventure.)
The player’s story is this:
He had gotten one mangled word, “dont”, on his right hand and “care” on his left when he cut short the tattoo session — apparently because tattoos on fingers are particularly painful.
Thus, it was not his intent for him to be reminded he doesn’t give a damn, every time he looks at his fingers.
Jose Holebas seems sufficiently “out there” that we could believe “don’t care” is exactly what he intended. After all, he has “trust nobody” tattooed on his chest.
Maybe he will get back to it, eventually, and add the “hate love” bits. Until then, it’s pretty much a declaration of deep anomie … or just really lame.
Who is Jose Holebas? He is a German national, with a Greek father and Uruguayan mother, who plays for the Greek national team and, currently, for Watford FC of the English Premier League.
He pretty clearly is a knucklehead, as most European footballers are. Soccer might be played by middle-class kids in the U.S., but on the other side of the Atlantic it is filled with guys from the bottom of the economic spectrum — which also tends to be the demographic most likely to have a few too many pints and head to the tattoo parlor for garish results from hours of anguish.
Some other famously bad tattoos?
Those with typos in them are hard to beat. Houston quarterback Brock Osweiler allegedly has “live life to it’s fullest” (“it’s” is a contraction for “it is”) and NBA guard Larry Sanders boasts the non-word “recieve” on his hand — instead of “receive”.
(Remember, “‘i’ before ‘e’ except after c'”.)
Eventually, I’m going to get around to my favorite soccer players and NBA players who manage to compete without tattoos. There are a few. Really.
1 response so far ↓
1 Doug // Jul 23, 2016 at 4:03 PM
My favorites are the bone heads who have neck tattoos which almost almost look terrible and must be painful to have done. Don’t any of these guys have mirrors? I suspect your list of famous athletes without tattoos will be quite short.
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