Ed Sheeran’s Perplexing Matisse Tattoo Has Taken Over My Life
The singer’s unintentionally sexual ink has resided in my dirty mind rent-free for more than a decade.
Despite his well-earned reputation as a critical punching bag, Ed Sheeran's music is actually pretty easy to avoid or ignore. It's the ultimate Walgreen’s white noise, a corny, horny, snoozy soundtrack to buying deodorant. But there’s something else about the pop imp that is a lot harder for me to dismiss: his tattoos, which are strewn over his body in a gaudy jumble of shapes and colors.
Ed’s ink includes: a Heinz ketchup label, a decapitated Lego head, Puss in Boots, the gingerbread man from Shrek, Blinky the Three-Eyed Fish from The Simpsons, the word “PRINCE” written in the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air font, a cup of tea (just ’cause a radio station wanted him to get a tattoo on-air), Saoirse Ronan’s intentional misspelling of Sheeran’s song “Galway Girl,” a matching Pingu tattoo with Harry Styles, and enough hand-scrawled lyrics to fill an emo kid’s notebook. There’s also a giant lion head on his chest that invited negative reactions the minute Ed shared a pic of that shit with only half of the mane done. Years later, he posted a photo of his lion-less chest and said he was “only joking about the lion.” But that was a prank, and the lion is unfortunately real. Al Roker summed up the insanely dumb ordeal with one word on the Today show: “Yikes.”
To be fair, a lot of musicians have bad, random tattoos. And Sheeran has at least gotten a number of them to mark career milestones: The lion, which appears on the flag of England's national football team, marked three sold-out shows at Wembley Stadium. It's also somehow better than another idea Sheeran had to mark the occasion—inking the famed venue's floor plan on his chest. Other tattoos represent countries that Sheeran toured through, the trips commemorated with a koala or a maple leaf or whatever. His sentimental little heart is in the right place even when his aesthetic sensibility is not. Which is why I’m almost sorry to slam him for what may seem like his most tasteful piece of ink, one whose inspiration might make you go “awww”—until you really look at it.
On the outside of his left forearm, there is a large recreation of a lithograph by Henri Matisse, one of Sheeran’s mum’s favorite painters. It shows two faceless people embracing, the larger figure holding the smaller one from behind. The style is primitive, almost as though Matisse was trying to use the least amount of line strokes as possible. (“My line drawing is the purest and most direct translation of my emotion,” Matisse once wrote.) But in the version on Sheeran’s arm, the smaller person has a weirdly sassy upright stance, and the looseness of the whole thing makes it look like two people fucking standing up. I can't be the only one who sees this.
Matisse’s original is called “Mother and Child,” and it’s just one of the artist’s late-in-life takes on the vast genre of “Virgin Mary holding baby Jesus” art. Matisse’s other drawings in this vein are more fleshed out—some feature defined faces, bodies, even celestial backgrounds; others tweak the perspective so the child is positioned more… appropriately. By contrast, the half-baked version found on Sheeran is less overtly religious. Even on someone with more than 50 tattoos, it’s pretty much impossible to ignore, since it’s so big and there’s so much negative space within and around it. His right sleeve is an eyesore of haphazardness, so a few black lines should be an antidote. Instead, these brushstrokes put my perverted mind to work.
TV hosts are always asking Ed about his tattoos, and he tends to chalk them up to being an odd bird, as though 90 percent of pop singers don’t have tattoos these days. His 2015 conversation with Charlie Rose about this is memorable, though. My favorite part is when Sheeran is like, blah blah blah this artist Henri Matisse, as if Charlie Rose wouldn’t be familiar with the second-most famous painter of the 20th century. Anyway, watching this appearance made me hate myself even more for thinking dirty thoughts, because Ed is actually quite sweet about the whole thing. He explains that when he got his first paycheck from music, he bought his mum a print of “Mother and Child.”
The reason this tattoo has lived in my mind rent-free for more than a decade has to do with the gap between Sheeran’s good intentions and the reality of how it looks (reverse ballet dancer position, anyone?). I have a screenshot of his forearm saved on my phone, and I’ll sometimes share it with friends just so that I'm not alone in the misfortune of knowing this thing exists. I do this especially with other critics, as if to say: Panning Sheeran’s music is too easy, here’s a more creative way to hate. (Though plenty of people have taken the piss out of Sheeran for his tattoos, including the artist who did most of them.)
Perhaps the only productive thing to come out of this fixation is how it led me to Matisse’s most interesting period of work. Unable to find a deeper explanation for Sheeran’s abomination, I submerged myself in the drama of the artist’s final decades in an effort to understand why he’d draw something so crude in the first place. Dude was a hornball—his wife of decades divorced him over an affair with one of his model-muses. Then he got this rare type of intestinal cancer and was left wheelchair-bound after surgery, forced to rely on nurses and studio assistants. So he created a whole new way of working, wherein assistants painted sheets of paper that he would cut into shapes and then pin or glue onto a surface to create something new—funky-looking plants in fantastic colors, bare bodies in motion.
Matisse had this beloved nurse/model who became a Dominican nun, and around this time she convinced him to help design a new chapel in Vence, France, near his home. The project took over his life for four years in the late ’40s and early ’50s, but when the Chapel of the Rosary was done, the ardently secular Matisse called it his masterpiece and credited the project with his newfound interest in the Divine. The church’s abstract stained-glass panels—designed using his cut-out method—are the big sell, but also notable: a large line drawing of mother (aka Madonna, Virgin Mary, etc.) and child, the little one’s arms outstretched among clouds that look like flowers. It’s the platonic ideal of Matisse’s “Mother and Child” (pun intended). Perhaps we can find a print for Mrs. Sheeran.
Post-script: Writing this blog post effectively exorcised the thought from my brain. Now three months later, I almost never think about Ed Sheeran’s tattoos, or Ed Sheeran at all. I do, however, find myself using elements of Matisse’s cut-out technique in my own art practice, so I guess some good did come of this obsession. Thanks Ed?
