Relax guys, it’s just for kicks! Ben Affleck revealed in a new interview with Extra TV that his much-talked about phoenix back tattoo is, in fact, fake.
“I actually do have a number of tattoos … but I try to have them in places where you don’t have to do a lot of cover up … they get sort of addictive, tattoos, after awhile,” he told show host Mario Lopez of the oversize ink, which he said he’d donned “for a movie.”
The 43-year-old actor first surprised fans with the colorful ink back in December, when was spotted with the enormous tattoo while working on the Los Angeles set of his upcoming film Live by Night.
The image includes the mythical beast spreading its wings wide across his shoulder blades, presumably rising from the ashes.
In her recent interview with Vanity Fair, Affleck’s ex-wife Jennifer Garner offered a few thinly veiled remarks about the body art.
“You know what we would say in my hometown about that? ‘Bless his heart,’” the West Virginia native, 43, told the magazine. “A phoenix rising from the ashes. Am I the ashes in this scenario? I take umbrage. I refuse to be the ashes.”
Garner wasn’t the only one of Affleck’s exes to comment publicly about the ink.
During an episode of Watch What Happens Live that aired on Monday, February 29, Jennifer Lopez smiled as she slammed her former flame’s tattoo (the pair had a very high-profile relationship between 2002 and 2004.)
“It’s awful!” the 46-year-old singer said. “And I would tell him that. I would tell him, what are you doing? It has too many colors! His tattoos have too many colors. They shouldn’t be so colorful, you know what I mean? They should be, like, cooler.”
