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.
