Chris Brown took a thrashing in the press on Tuesday when photos surfaced of his new neck tattoo which bears a resemblance to the police photo taken of Rihanna after he assaulted her in 2009. The R&B singer denied that the image was of his ex — it’s supposed to be a Día de los Muertos-inspired calavera — but that seemed beside the point. He’s still a woman-beater wearing a mutilated woman’s face on his body.
So, no sympathy for Breezy either way, but there has been an unintended victim in all of this: the tattoo artist. Los Angeles ink man Peter Koskela isn’t happy about the attention his work has been receiving. “I hate when people misinterpret what I do,” he told E! “It was really a blow to me to think that people would think so little of a person that I would actually put a picture of a beaten woman on his neck.
“That was crazy to me,” he continued, “[the idea] that he would come to me and say, ‘Hey, I want Rihanna’s face on me.’ I would never promote any kind of domestic violence like that. Even if he asked me to do it, I would have bounced right there. I don’t do racist tattoos, I don’t do gang-related tattoos and I don’t do anything hurtful. That is just the motto I live by. The other tattoo artists might, but I just don’t.”
Of course, what Koskela fails to acknowledge is that no one came to any conclusions about the tat based upon his character or quality of work. We got there because of what we know about Brown: his character and the quality of his work. And maybe Koskela has doubts too: “The dude is serious about his art […] but he never said why he wanted to get that particular piece.” Perhaps he should be chatting with the guy who tattooed Drake’s biggest fan.
