Angelina Jolie's Tattoos

Actress Angelina Jolie has the classic American-style of mixed designs with no background patterning on both of her arms. The designs are spaced and placed at whim, not fit together. Originally, the tattooing on her left bicep was the name "Billy Bob" (Thorton, her 2nd husband) and a black tribal dragon located just below that. Neither of those tattoos can be seen anymore, as both tattoos have been lasered off. Before she got new work in the same space, you used to be able to see faint traces of the original tattoos. What now occupies her left upper arm is a list of the latitude and longitude coordinates for the birthplaces of all her children: adoptees Maddox (Cambodia), Zahara (Ethiopia), and Pax (Vietnam), plus natural-born daughter Shiloh (Namibia), and twins Vivienne and Knox (France). There are six sets of coordinates listed, with the Nice, France numbers duplicated twice (once for each twin).

Her left inner forearm features a quote from Tennessee Williams. The line reads "A prayer for the wild at heart, kept in cages." This tattoo is a coverup for what used to be a tattoo of a Japanese kanji.

On Angelina's right forearm, she has an Arabic tattoo, which translates to "will (determination)." Supposedly this piece is a cover-up tattoo of another piece of ink that she got during her marriage to Thornton. That same arm also features a tattoo of the letter "H," in honor of her older brother, James Haven, and the Roman numeral 13.

Angelina's collection of back tattoos has been edited and added to almost as much as her arms, if not moreso. She used to wear the Japanese kanji that translated to "death" on her left shoulder, but that tattoo was covered over with an elaborate Buddhist prayer of protection. It is a Sanskrit blessing in the Cambodian language, and she has said it is to honor her first adopted son Maddox.

She has the phrase "know your rights" tattooed just below the base of her neck.

Her lower back is the area that has been added to the most. Originally she had two tiny tribal-style designs on either side of her spine and a small dragon. However on a trip to Thailand, she had that work topped by a large tiger design. The artwork of the tiger is in the traditional Thai style and the tattoo was also done traditionally. Working by hand, the artist manipulated a long needle the slides inside a hollow tube, making all the thousands of punctures one at a time.

Angelina has gotten three different tattoos on her stomach, but one was a cover-up of another.  She claims she used to have a blue dragon on the  left-hand side of her stomach, the result of an inebriated evening in the city of Amsterdam.  Apparenlty she has no recollection of getting that tattoo and had the proverbial "I just woke up with it" experience.  Dissatisfied with the design, she choice to have it covered up with a large, solid black cross, and later remarked that when people see the the top of the tattoo sticking up out of the waistband of her pants, some people think she's carrying a gun. 

Her second stomach tattoo is a phrase in Latin that is located just below her navel.  The translation of "Quod me netrit me destruit" is "What nourishes me also destroys me."

One thing many women worry about with stomach tattoos and pregnancies are that the artwork might be damaged by the stretching of the skin. I've heard both good and bad reports on this front. The first is yes, tattoos can be ruined by the skin stretching, so how fast you gain weight is something to keep an eye on. The second is that moisturizing the skin and drinking a lot of water are your best bets for avoiding any stomach tattoo damage. Rubbing cocoa butter onto your skin daily is a must! If the skin is kept hydrated enough and doesn't stretch too quickly, stretch marks can be avoided and your ink can be protected.

For her role as a world-class assassin in the movie WANTED, Angelina got to do something she doesn't get to do all that often. She got to let every single one of her own tattoos show. In fact, for her role as Fox, she decided it would be appropriate to add even more.  The tattoos you see on her in the movie are a mix of her own work and some theatrical fakes. 

Some of her inspiration came from Winston Churchill and his quote, "'We have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat." She had the words "toil" and "tears" added to the insides of her upper arms.

She also had her "know your rights" tattoo duplicated in Latin, and "strength of will" repeated in multiple languages.  On her left hand, she had a floral design added that went down her forearm and onto her hand.  Matching designs were applied to the gun her character uses so that when she held the weapon, the patterns lined up in one continuous design.