PrintChris Brown recently got a neck tattoo featuring a woman’s face—a bruised, scarred, disfigured woman’s face.
You’re probably doing a double-take right now, and you’re not the only one: The moment a photo of Brown with the new tat hit the web, everyone had questions. Was that seriously a battered woman on the body of a man involved in one of the most notorious, high-profile assault cases of recent memory? Was he trolling, or was he actually going there?
Well, never fret, because the tattoo artist responsible, Peter Koskela, is insisting that the woman on Brown’s body is not his ex-girlfriend, but rather a Day of the Dead sugar skull—allegedly inspired, by the way, by a design Brown saw at MAC Cosmetics. “I’m an artist and this is art. Dia de los Muertos,” Brown tweeted on Sept. 11. Meanwhile, in response
to the internet backlash, Koskela insisted, “I would never promote any kind of domestic violence like that.”
Granted, it’s Chris Brown’s body, and at the end of the day, if he wants to cover himself with graphics designed by the company that makes Lady Gaga lipstick, that’s his prerogative. Hey, maybe he just really likes sugar skulls. But if O.J. Simpson got a glove tattooed on his neck and insisted it was just “art,” there’d be some raised eyebrows. And Brown’s choice of design, no matter what the personal context, is still an image indicative of a crime that most of the world hasn’t forgotten.
According to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, 207,754 women are domestically abused every year. For many of those women, the pain lasts for a lifetime—unlike the ink of a tattoo, it doesn’t fade. Chris Brown may have the right to cover his body in clip-art, but we also have the right to call him out on it—especially when it causes such a gut-punch reaction.