Chris Rock’s first tattoo at 55 is Basquiat crown

Chris Rock may be the best dad ever—a minimum of, he’s cool sufficient for certainly one of his teenage daughters to need to get an identical tattoo. That’s a reasonably large deal in our books. New York tattoo parlour Bang Bang Tattoo revealed on their Instagram this week that the comic dropped by for his first ever ink on the age of 55 and introduced alongside his daughter who acquired the same tattoo.

The black-and-white publish shared three photographs from the event, the primary of which featured Rock in a masks (as he needs to be!) displaying his new Basquiat crown tattoo on his left shoulder, adopted by a close-up of the tribute to Haitian-American painter and road artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.

The publish doesn’t specify which of the Rock girls acquired inked (Lola is 18-years-old and Zahra is 16), however the third photograph reveals what appears to be certainly one of Rock’s daughter’s shoulders sporting a commonly referenced image of Basquiat’s—a dinosaur along with his signature crown above its head. Now that’s some cute father-daughter bonding.

The crown is a motif so frequent within the late Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work, it’s basically a creative signature. He used the crown to raise figures in his artwork to royalty, significantly Black male artists, writers, athletes and musicians. His pal and up to date Francesco Clemente once explained, “Jean-Michel’s crown has three peaks, for his three royal lineages: the poet, the musician, the nice boxing champion.” The absence of a crown additionally made some extent in his artwork—as evidenced in his piece “Irony of the Negro Policeman” the place he pointedly topped a picture of a misshapen man with a hat, relatively than the crown. Rising to fame in New York Metropolis similtaneously hip-hop, a number of the themes in his artwork mirrored the identical sentiments.

It’s not a stretch to think about the importance of this tattoo to Chris Rock and it appears it might have been a very long time within the making. Again in 2010, the comic attended the premiere of the Basquiat documentary, Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Youngster together with Alicia Keys.

Rock’s selection of tattoo parlour could have been vital as effectively—the Bang Bang Tattoo studio is donating a portion of income to ten different charities and programs together with The Loveland Foundation devoted to Black girls’s psychological well being outreach, The Okra Project devoted to Black trans outreach, The Innocence Project devoted to jail reform, and the First Nations Development Institute.