Ben Affleck Loves His Phoenix Back Tattoo Now

By Mike Redmond | Celebrity | March 14, 2019 |

By Mike Redmond | Celebrity | March 14, 2019 |

Millennia ago, in the ancient ruins of 2015, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner separated, and it became overwhelmingly clear that she was a goddamn saint for keeping his douchebag demons in line during their entire marriage. Because as soon as the news was out, he bought a muscle car, banged the nanny, and got this bad boy tattooed on his back.

Ben Affleck has a rainbow phoenix tattoo so everyone can stop being so hard on themselves pic.twitter.com/cOOhfBpF76

— Caroline Meissner (@C_Meisss) December 14, 2016

In an interview with Vanity Fair, Jennifer Garner had the exact right response to her ex-husband’s horseshittery, and slapped him with the harshest southern burn of them all. (Emphasis mine.)

One thing is for sure: she refuses to claim responsibility for the midlife-crisis tattoo—the rising phoenix—that takes up her estranged husband’s entire back, as seen in photographs. “You know what we would say in my hometown about that? ‘Bless his heart.’ A phoenix rising from the ashes. Am I the ashes in this scenario?” Garner says with a wink.

“I take umbrage. I refuse to be the ashes.”

Even Jennifer Lopez couldn’t resist dragging him, and for some extra flavor, this was when she thought dating Casper Smart was a great idea. Via Hollywood Life:

“It’s AWFUL! I would tell him that, I would tell him,” Jennifer admitted during a game of Plead the Fifth. “Like, what are you doing? It has too many colors. His tattoos always have too many colors! They shouldn’t be so colorful. They should be, like… cooler.”

But probably the biggest sign that the tattoo was a mistake was when Ben Affleck lied to Mario Lopez’s face and said it was “fake for a movie.”

It was not.

FYI: There's no phoenix back tattoo in Live By Night. pic.twitter.com/4i2h6n7MgP

— Kristy Puchko (@KristyPuchko) January 18, 2017

Fast forward to this week when Affleck sat down with Ellen and not only admitted that the tattoo is real, but that he couldn’t be happier with it.

Via PEOPLE:

“It’s not something that I sort of kept private. It wasn’t like I was doing photoshoots or whatever, we were two hours north of the city on an island in Hawaii and we didn’t know the paparazzi were there,” Affleck told DeGeneres of the shot. “So they got a picture of my tattoo. And sentiment ran … you know, against.”

DeGeneres played into that, joking that it was a phoenix “rising from your ass.”

Still, Affleck stood by the tattoo, explaining that it “represents something important to me.”

“It’s meaningful to me, I like it,” he said. “I love my tattoo. I’m very happy with it. Luckily, I’m the one who has it.”

Yeah, cool story, but we’ve seen the thing hanging above your ass crack at least 50 times by now, so let’s talk about this little nugget of information that I was not aware of.

According to a source, Affleck had gotten the tattoo done after his split from Jennifer Garner in 2015 while he was still living in a guest house on the family’s Los Angeles compound. “They had a huge tattoo machine at the house for days,” the insider previously told PEOPLE. “It took hours and hours to finish.”

Jesus f*cking Christ, Jennifer Garner is a saint (not counting Peppermint).

Imagine separating from your husband and trying to do right by your kids by letting him stick around. In return, he hauls a goddamn tattoo machine onto your property, spends days airbrushing a giant-ass bird on his back that might as well have read “JENNIFAH FACKIN’ GARNAH IS THE ASHES,” and then proceeds to drop a shit cherry on this turd sundae by banging the nanny, which forces you to scramble to find a replacement.

I’ve seen you do karate. Use it!