Scott Rossi was in Southern California, taking photographs along the Colorado River, when he met a man swimming. He noticed there was a tattoo peeking out of the top of the man’s bathing suit (“Right above his groin,” Rossi remembers). When he asked the man about it, he revealed a large tattoo that read “WENDY” and pointed to a woman a few feet away. “It got me thinking, What drives somebody to do that?” Rossi tells the Cut. “And then, What does the partner think?”
Historically, tattoos of lovers’ names call to mind whirlwind public romances: Johnny Depp’s “WINONA FOREVER” (which he has since changed to “WINO FOREVER”), Angelina Jolie’s “Billy Bob” bicep tattoo during her tryst with Billy Bob Thornton in the early aughts (also since covered and replaced with a tattoo of the coordinates of her family’s birthplaces), Bennifer permanently inking their love on each other’s bodies two decades after their initial engagement, Brooklyn Peltz Beckham almost losing count of how many tattoos he has dedicated to his wife, Nicola (he estimates it’s about 70 out of 100), and who could forget Pete Davidson’s multiple tattoos honoring his A-list lovers (the many Ariana Grande–themed tattoos and “MY GIRL IS A LAWYER” for Kim Kardashian). There’s a certain air of tackiness associated with these public displays of affection that belies an authentic sweetness and faith required to undertake them.
When interviewing the subjects photographed for this project, the one through-line I found was that nobody regretted their tattoo. One woman who had her ex-husband’s name on her rib told me that she liked to remember there was a version of herself that was able to feel so optimistic. Even if the relationship had failed or hurt, or even if their partner didn’t approve, the tattoo remains meaningful to them. “The project talks a lot about who we are as people and how we handle relationships,” Rossi adds. “And if people are willing to actually believe or fall in love, or if they’re hesitant or reserved, that speaks a lot to who we are as a people.”
Coco Latex once tattooed an image of their then-partner’s arm on themselves. “I was deeply in love. Before I figured out my identity and my gender and all this stuff, I really used tattoos as a means of kind of making sense of the internal pain. At that time, I was probably just missing the shit out of her. I fell in love with her nose first. She has this beautiful nose, and I was going to tattoo her nose on me, but then I decided to do her arm. I just really missed her at the time, and as a way of physicalizing that feeling, I chose to tattoo myself in that moment.”
Coco Latex at their home in Bushwick.
“Tattooing, for so many queer and femme people, is all about, like — or not all about, but a lot of times it’s about them taking ownership over body parts or their body in general. I’ve struggled, and I’ve since let it go for the most part because it did turn out to be a pretty abusive relationship, verbally. It’s no pain held toward her, but it is nice knowing that that’s a tattoo that I’ve done and that I could say has nothing to do with her if I wanted.”
“If there’s one thing tattoos have taught me and the friends in my community — that we’ve talked about with other tattooers — is you kind of are humbled, in the sense that it is on your body forever. And at a certain point, there’s acceptance to that history, to those aspects of your body. You learn that it’s okay. And you learn that this is the body that I’m given, so I’m just going to make the most of it, and I’m just going to stick it out.”
Sarah Whalen surprised her husband with a tattoo of his name. “We met over Twitter. We got engaged in 2018. There was so much buildup to this wedding — a lot of pressure, a lot of nervousness. In 2020, our wedding was postponed until September 2021. John’s my first real relationship as an adult, as a dating person, and it wound up working out, but I always felt such a connection to him even from when we first started talking and I was still living on the West Coast. He’s always been a very special person to me.”
Sarah Whalen with her husband, Jonathan, at their home in Park Slope.
“I thought it would be funny to surprise him with it. He got so pissed. We’ve been together almost ten years; we’ve had our arguments, but this was hands down one of the biggest fights we’ve ever been in, and it was mainly just him being so disappointed in me and just so, like, ‘I hate surprises! I can’t believe you did this! You tell me everything you do! I can’t believe —’ I was shocked.”
“My job is OnlyFans, and all of these photos for work, his name is just right there, so I’m glad that he’s kind of come around to it. A lot of promotion for OnlyFans is on Reddit, so people in the comments will be like, ‘Who’s Jonathan?’ Or like, ‘Jonathan’s a lucky guy!’ But no one’s like, ‘Oh, that’s so stupid!’ If they’re paying that much attention, they’re like, ‘Good for him!’”
Jordan Forrest tattooed her ex-husband’s name on her ribs, but she isn’t concerned with covering it up. “I can’t remember whose idea it was — probably mine because I was 24. So I was really young and super-excited. He has my name on his arm. We are still friends, but we’ve been separated for three years, and neither of us have covered up the tattoos yet. I kind of think it’s sweet that I was that optimistic and that I really believed that we were going to stay together. I was so crazy about him. I don’t regret being that enthusiastic about our relationship.”
Jordan Forrest at her apartment in Cobble Hill.
“His was in red ink, and it’s a lot larger. Apparently the tattoo artist told him it was good that he was getting it in red ink because it’s easier to cover up red ink than black ink. And I got mine in black ink. No one said anything to me. I truly had no reservations or doubts, and it’s sad that that didn’t end up happening, but I like knowing that I have that part of myself that I’m able to feel like that.”
“The divorce really threw me for a loop for a lot of reasons, obviously. I was like, Oh shit. I really don’t know what’s going to happen with anything. You can’t really be sure anything’s going to last, so now I’m a lot more cynical and cautious when I start dating someone.”
Jose and Cynthia (Cindy) have been together for 32 years. They first started dating as teenagers. “She was just beautiful. I was working in a meat market because at that age our parents made us work. I just saw her walking by, and just the beauty of her, and I saw her struggling and I thought, This girl shouldn’t be struggling. She deserves somebody helping her. And I definitely helped her up the stairs,” Jose says. “My mother used to make me wash clothes every Friday. When he helped me up the stairs, we started talking. We clicked,” Cindy says.
Jose and Cynthia (Cindy) at their tattoo shop, Blazin Skinz, in Bushwick.
Their tattoos started out as a gag-gift idea, then became serious: “I was just in love with her, and she did my name after my daughter was born,” Jose says. “They put my name on her back and then I had mine on my chest, but it was like a house tattoo. She got it professionally done. I got mine redone with her name.”
“I cover up names on the regular in that store. I do about ten to 15 a month. I don’t know why they do it — if they think it’s really love or lust. I don’t know what it is,” Jose says. “We’ve even had customers that come in that just met. Of course, we don’t voice our opinion, but we already know that they’re not gonna make it because they be just together, like, two to three weeks. When I got it done, we were together — I already had my daughter, so we were talking, like, approximately a year and a few months,” Cindy says.
Johanna tells the story of the “whirlwind” romance that inspired her tattoo: “I was 22 and had just graduated from college. I met a guy through a friend, and we fell in love and got tattoos basically right away and then broke up a few months later. So it’s not a very long story. The guy was an architect and a very precise and controlling personality type. It felt like a very carefree, spontaneous experience until we were actually getting the tattoo. We were really obsessed with getting a superfine line, which is why it still looks so nice.”
Johanna Beck at her home in Park Slope.
“I genuinely love the tattoo. It’s really nice. It’s his signature. His name was Henrik. He was Danish, which I think also added to the charm at the time.”
“I’ve gotten a lot of shit for it, but he has not only my name on his body but the previous girlfriend — the one before me — too. I can’t remember ever wanting to remove it. I feel like regret is almost built into the process for me of getting tattoos, but I don’t remember thinking of getting that one removed or covered up, because I like it.”
Ashley shares the story of the tattoo she recently received in honor of her late husband, Rob: “Rob was talking about tattoos for a while after he first got surgery in 2019. He was diagnosed with peritoneal mesothelioma. He was thinking about getting a tattoo kind of around the scar that he got from the surgery. It was always just kind of in the back of his mind, my mind — and after he died, I kind of wanted something to memorialize him in, like, another permanent way that wasn’t just my brain or just with my wedding rings that I wear.”
Ashley Reese at her home in Bed-Stuy.
“I took this photo on Rob’s 33rd birthday on October 18, 2021. It was one of the last stress-free birthdays we had together. We were at a bar somewhere in Brooklyn, and Rob loved a beer. We were getting some drinks before going to dinner for his birthday, and I just shot this photo of him. It’s just a quintessential Rob photo. He’s a very reserved guy, unlike me, who’s a fucking loudmouth. He has an easygoing smile.”
“I love telling stories. It doesn’t make all the pain go away, but it feels like a really powerful way to honor him. I try to honor him and his memory in lots of ways, but I think that having something permanently on you like this, it’s kind of, like, another level of dedication, and I always want to — it’s a part of me, you know? He is a part of me, and it’s almost like it makes sense for him to be on me in this way or be along for the ride. What really surprised me about being a widow is that you really want to talk about your person, you know?”
Coco Latex once tattooed an image of their then-partner’s arm on themselves. “I was deeply in love. Before I figured out my identity and my gender and all this stuff, I really used tattoos as a means of kind of making sense of the internal pain. At that time, I was probably just missing the shit out of her. I fell in love with her nose first. She has this beautiful nose, and I was going to tattoo her nose on me, but then I decided to do her arm. I just really missed her at the time, and as a way of physicalizing that feeling, I chose to tattoo myself in that moment.”
Coco Latex at their home in Bushwick.
“Tattooing, for so many queer and femme people, is all about, like — or not all about, but a lot of times it’s about them taking ownership over body parts or their body in general. I’ve struggled, and I’ve since let it go for the most part because it did turn out to be a pretty abusive relationship, verbally. It’s no pain held toward her, but it is nice knowing that that’s a tattoo that I’ve done and that I could say has nothing to do with her if I wanted.”
“If there’s one thing tattoos have taught me and the friends in my community — that we’ve talked about with other tattooers — is you kind of are humbled, in the sense that it is on your body forever. And at a certain point, there’s acceptance to that history, to those aspects of your body. You learn that it’s okay. And you learn that this is the body that I’m given, so I’m just going to make the most of it, and I’m just going to stick it out.”
Sarah Whalen surprised her husband with a tattoo of his name. “We met over Twitter. We got engaged in 2018. There was so much buildup to this wedding — a lot of pressure, a lot of nervousness. In 2020, our wedding was postponed until September 2021. John’s my first real relationship as an adult, as a dating person, and it wound up working out, but I always felt such a connection to him even from when we first started talking and I was still living on the West Coast. He’s always been a very special person to me.”
Sarah Whalen with her husband, Jonathan, at their home in Park Slope.
“I thought it would be funny to surprise him with it. He got so pissed. We’ve been together almost ten years; we’ve had our arguments, but this was hands down one of the biggest fights we’ve ever been in, and it was mainly just him being so disappointed in me and just so, like, ‘I hate surprises! I can’t believe you did this! You tell me everything you do! I can’t believe —’ I was shocked.”
“My job is OnlyFans, and all of these photos for work, his name is just right there, so I’m glad that he’s kind of come around to it. A lot of promotion for OnlyFans is on Reddit, so people in the comments will be like, ‘Who’s Jonathan?’ Or like, ‘Jonathan’s a lucky guy!’ But no one’s like, ‘Oh, that’s so stupid!’ If they’re paying that much attention, they’re like, ‘Good for him!’”
Jordan Forrest tattooed her ex-husband’s name on her ribs, but she isn’t concerned with covering it up. “I can’t remember whose idea it was — probably mine because I was 24. So I was really young and super-excited. He has my name on his arm. We are still friends, but we’ve been separated for three years, and neither of us have covered up the tattoos yet. I kind of think it’s sweet that I was that optimistic and that I really believed that we were going to stay together. I was so crazy about him. I don’t regret being that enthusiastic about our relationship.”
Jordan Forrest at her apartment in Cobble Hill.
“His was in red ink, and it’s a lot larger. Apparently the tattoo artist told him it was good that he was getting it in red ink because it’s easier to cover up red ink than black ink. And I got mine in black ink. No one said anything to me. I truly had no reservations or doubts, and it’s sad that that didn’t end up happening, but I like knowing that I have that part of myself that I’m able to feel like that.”
“The divorce really threw me for a loop for a lot of reasons, obviously. I was like, Oh shit. I really don’t know what’s going to happen with anything. You can’t really be sure anything’s going to last, so now I’m a lot more cynical and cautious when I start dating someone.”
Jose and Cynthia (Cindy) have been together for 32 years. They first started dating as teenagers. “She was just beautiful. I was working in a meat market because at that age our parents made us work. I just saw her walking by, and just the beauty of her, and I saw her struggling and I thought, This girl shouldn’t be struggling. She deserves somebody helping her. And I definitely helped her up the stairs,” Jose says. “My mother used to make me wash clothes every Friday. When he helped me up the stairs, we started talking. We clicked,” Cindy says.
Jose and Cynthia (Cindy) at their tattoo shop, Blazin Skinz, in Bushwick.
Their tattoos started out as a gag-gift idea, then became serious: “I was just in love with her, and she did my name after my daughter was born,” Jose says. “They put my name on her back and then I had mine on my chest, but it was like a house tattoo. She got it professionally done. I got mine redone with her name.”
“I cover up names on the regular in that store. I do about ten to 15 a month. I don’t know why they do it — if they think it’s really love or lust. I don’t know what it is,” Jose says. “We’ve even had customers that come in that just met. Of course, we don’t voice our opinion, but we already know that they’re not gonna make it because they be just together, like, two to three weeks. When I got it done, we were together — I already had my daughter, so we were talking, like, approximately a year and a few months,” Cindy says.
Johanna tells the story of the “whirlwind” romance that inspired her tattoo: “I was 22 and had just graduated from college. I met a guy through a friend, and we fell in love and got tattoos basically right away and then broke up a few months later. So it’s not a very long story. The guy was an architect and a very precise and controlling personality type. It felt like a very carefree, spontaneous experience until we were actually getting the tattoo. We were really obsessed with getting a superfine line, which is why it still looks so nice.”
Johanna Beck at her home in Park Slope.
“I genuinely love the tattoo. It’s really nice. It’s his signature. His name was Henrik. He was Danish, which I think also added to the charm at the time.”
“I’ve gotten a lot of shit for it, but he has not only my name on his body but the previous girlfriend — the one before me — too. I can’t remember ever wanting to remove it. I feel like regret is almost built into the process for me of getting tattoos, but I don’t remember thinking of getting that one removed or covered up, because I like it.”
Ashley shares the story of the tattoo she recently received in honor of her late husband, Rob: “Rob was talking about tattoos for a while after he first got surgery in 2019. He was diagnosed with peritoneal mesothelioma. He was thinking about getting a tattoo kind of around the scar that he got from the surgery. It was always just kind of in the back of his mind, my mind — and after he died, I kind of wanted something to memorialize him in, like, another permanent way that wasn’t just my brain or just with my wedding rings that I wear.”
Ashley Reese at her home in Bed-Stuy.
“I took this photo on Rob’s 33rd birthday on October 18, 2021. It was one of the last stress-free birthdays we had together. We were at a bar somewhere in Brooklyn, and Rob loved a beer. We were getting some drinks before going to dinner for his birthday, and I just shot this photo of him. It’s just a quintessential Rob photo. He’s a very reserved guy, unlike me, who’s a fucking loudmouth. He has an easygoing smile.”
“I love telling stories. It doesn’t make all the pain go away, but it feels like a really powerful way to honor him. I try to honor him and his memory in lots of ways, but I think that having something permanently on you like this, it’s kind of, like, another level of dedication, and I always want to — it’s a part of me, you know? He is a part of me, and it’s almost like it makes sense for him to be on me in this way or be along for the ride. What really surprised me about being a widow is that you really want to talk about your person, you know?”