Mike Tyson's tattoos
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The American boxer Mike Tyson has at least seven tattoos. Three—at least two of them prison tattoos—are portraits of men he respects: tennis player Arthur Ashe, Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara, and
Tyson's tattoo of Che Guevara is derived from the photograph Guerrillero Heroico by Alberto Korda.
Tyson's face tattoo, photographed in 2013
Tyson in 2011, with his face tattoo visible
An example of traditional tā moko design belonging to Tāme Iti
Tā moko
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Tā moko is the permanent marking or tattooing as customarily practised by Māori, the indigenous people of New Zealand. It is one of the five main Polynesian tattoo styles.
Mike Tyson's tattoos
…player Arthur Ashe, Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara, and Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong. Tyson's face tattoo, influenced by the Māori style tā moko, was designed and inked by S. Victor Whitmill in 2003; Tyson associates it with the Māori being warriors and has called it his "warrior tattoo", a name…
Sketch of a Māori chief, 1773 engraving by T. Chambers based on a 1769 drawing by Sydney Parkinson, from the 1784 edition of A Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas
"Portrait of a young Maori woman with moko", by Louis John Steele (1891)
Portrait of Tāmati Wāka Nene by Gottfried Lindauer (1890)
Painting by Gottfried Lindauer of a moko being carved into a man's face by a tohunga-tā-moko (tattooist)