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Claudia Willen and Libby Torres
Updated
- Actress Megan Fox has over 20 tattoos, and recently added to her collection.
- Some are references to famous figures or literary works. Others are tributes to those close to her.
- Insider created a comprehensive guide to all of Fox's known tattoos.
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The Chinese symbol for "strength" is drawn on the back of her neck.
The actress has a tattoo of the Chinese symbol for "strength" on the back of her neck in black ink.
Fox frequently wears her hair down to events, so the small design isn't often photographed or seen by fans. However, it's visible when she pulls her hair back.
She hasn't confirmed exactly when she got the tattoo.
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She has a tattoo that references the final scene in William Shakespeare's play "King Lear."
On the back of her right shoulder, Fox has a tattoo that reads, "We will all laugh at gilded butterflies."
The words reference a line in act five, scene 3 of Shakespeare's 1606 play "King Lear," though the tattoo isn't a direct quote from the text.
Shakespeare writes: "So we'll live, and pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh at gilded butterflies."
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On the inside of her wrist, Fox has a tattoo that resembles yin and yang.
The "Rogue" star has a black symbol on the inside of her wrist. Fox hasn't confirmed the meaning behind the art, but it loosely resembles yin and yang.
As John Bellaimey, the head of the religion department at Breck School, pointed out in his TED-Ed talk "The Hidden Meanings of Yin and Yang," the symbol of duality is rooted in an ancient Chinese religion and philosophy called Daoism.
"The yin is the dark swirl, and the yang is the light one. Each side has a dot of the opposite color," Bellaimey explained, adding, "Everything contains the seed of its opposite."
Fox's tattoo has the general shape of the yin and yang symbol, but it's not the same black-and-white pattern.
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She has a crescent moon entwined with a star on her ankle.
The colorful tattoo depicts a moon on top of a blue star.
Though Fox hasn't confirmed the ink's significance, she's spoken numerous times about her interest in astrology.
"There's something to it, although we don't have all the information, which makes it easy for people to take advantage of each other," she said on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!"
When Fox first met her fiancé Machine Gun Kelly (Colson Baker) while they were filming "Midnight in the Switchgrass" in 2020, she said she read his astrological chart.
"I asked him to come into my trailer for lunch, and I put him through all of this astrology stuff. I went deep right away. I knew before I even did his chart, I said to him, he has a Pisces moon. I could tell by his energy," she said on "Give Them Lala ... With Randall."
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Fox has a poem tattooed on her side.
The tattoo reads: "There once was a little girl, who never knew love until a boy broke her heart."
Fox hasn't confirmed where the words originally appeared or when she added the design to her collection.
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A Friedrich Nietzsche quote is drawn on her back.
Fox has the line, "And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music," tattooed on the side of her back.
The quote has been attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche, a 19th-century German philosopher and cultural critic.
Fox told MTV that she got the tattoo "sort of" in honor of her "Passion Play" costar Mickey Rourke but later clarified that it's "not necessarily a homage to him."
"It was not about that. I have a tattoo that is a Nietzsche quote that sort of basically is about marching to the beat of your own drummer and not being afraid to do that. I was saying that it reminds me of Mickey, of course, because he clearly is not marching to anyone else's drummer, drumbeat, and that's all," she said.
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Fox once had her ex-husband Brian Austin Green's first name tattooed on her hip.
While she was still in a relationship with Green, Fox got a tattoo tribute to the "Beverly Hills 90210" actor. His first name, drawn in cursive text, sat on her inner hip.
Though Fox and Green are broken up, they were in an on-again, off-again relationship for roughly 16 years.
They began dating in 2004 and got married in 2010. The couple briefly separated in 2015 before rekindling their relationship in 2016. Fox and Green have three sons together — Noah, 8; Bodhi, 7; and Journey, 5.
In early 2020, they separated once again, and the "Jennifer's Body" actress went public with her relationship with Kelly shortly thereafter.
Later that year, Fox officially filed for divorce from Green. In 2023, she covered up her tattoo of Green's name.
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She removed the Marilyn Monroe tattoo that was once on her forearm.
Fox had a portrait of late actress Marilyn Monroe drawn on her forearm shortly after wrapping production on "Transformers" (2007).
"I've always liked her and, like I said, been intrigued by her because she created a character that she lived behind. So she was always playing a character within a character in all of her movies. I think the psychology behind that is very interesting," she said during a 2009interview with The New York Times.
Fox added, "I didn't want to be literal. I didn't want to put someone on my arm that I wanted to emulate."
The same year, she told Us Weekly that she got the tattoo as a "warning" to herself.
"I really admire Marilyn Monroe, but I would never try to emulate her. I got the tattoo as a warning. It warns me not to let myself be treated so badly by the film industry so that it breaks me down," she explained.
In 2011, Fox announced plansto remove the tattoo after learning about the actress' struggle with mental health disorders in an interview with Amica, an Italian magazine.
"It is a negative character, as she suffered from personality disorders and was bipolar. I do not want to attract this kind of negative energy in my life," she explained, according to HuffPost.
She also told CinemaBlend that she "went through a phase" of trying to rid herself of "anything" that carried any negativity — her Monroe tattoo included.
"There's been so much debate about did she commit suicide, was she murdered, there's so much negativity around her. It's not like I needed to have it on my body," Fox said.
She continued, "It's not that I don't love her — I got it in the first place because everyone loves Marilyn. But she suffered a lot."
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Her collarbone tattoo appears to be inspired by her fiancé, Kelly.
Fox and Kelly made their red-carpet debut as a couple at the 2020 American Music Awards. As they posed for photographs, fans noticed a small black tattoo on the actress' collarbone.The black ink reads, "el pistolero," which means "the gunman," in Spanish.
Social media users speculated that Fox got the ink as a tribute to her beau since his stage name is Machine Gun Kelly. The actress hasn't, however, confirmed the meaning behind the tattoo.
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Fox got flowers and a snake inked on her bikini line to cover up her old tattoo of Green's name.
According to a post by tattoo artist @jesse.tattoo, he covered up the cursive script of Green's name with a flowers and a snake.
"Was able to completely hide the old tattoo underneath the new snake and flowers she wanted," the artist noted in his Instagram post featuring Fox's new cover-up.
The new tattoo features a long snake slithering through a floral arrangement, and appears to run from the top of Fox's pubic area to the side of her abdomen.
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Fox also added over a dozen tiny finger tattoos to her collection in July 2023.
Artist Sydney Smith shared a video of the delicate tattoos to her Instagram page, captioning the clip simply: "Finger tats on @meganfox," along with a fire emoji.
In the video, Fox shows off the tiny dots and symbols now inked on her fingers. (There's 19 in total.) Her new tattoos include what appear to be two 11s (one on each of her pinky fingers), an all-seeing eye, a crescent moon, and various small rows of dots, sparkles, and other small symbols.
Each of Fox's fingers now has at least one small tattoo.
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