We don’t get even a glimpse of Ben Affleck’s giant, majestic back tattoo in his new Netflix movie Triple Frontier, and truly the movie is all the worse for it. It’s big and bold: an august phoenix rising from the ashes of its past mistakes! It was long rumored, occasionally papped, but finally fully spotted when Affleck (along with co-stars Charlie Hunnam, Garrett Hedlund, and Oscar Isaac) trained for the movie on a beach in Hawaii last year. On Ellen Thursday afternoon, Affleck addressed the tat: “It’s a phoenix rising from my ass,” he joked. “I was about to say that it represents something really important to me, but we’ll skip that. It’s meaningful to me. I like it. It’s not something that I kept private — I wasn’t doing photo shoots or whatever.”
Affleck’s exes, Jennifers Garner and Lopez (and, of course, Matt Damon), have publicly expressed their distaste for the tattoo, which he got in 2015. “The sentiment ran against [it],” Affleck said, about the collective groan the tattoo inspired everywhere around the world except in Boston, probably. “But I love my tattoo, I’m super happy with it.” Ben Affleck and Ben Affleck’s back tattoo: They’re for keeps!
