ByElla Jay
WWE/Getty Images
In addition to being a professional wrestler, Rhea Ripley has long dreamed of being the most tattooed human in all of existence. In a new video, those two passions converged, with the former WWE Women's World Champion showing off her collection of tattoos on WWE's YouTube channel.
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According to Ripley, her affinity for tattoos sparked at a young age, as both her father and mother had each gotten themselves inked. Her father, who "straight up looked like a biker," had particularly piqued Ripley's interest as she grew up, often finding herself wishing she could color in his tattoos.
Fast forward to 2018, Ripley continued the family trend with her very first tattoo — the date of WWE's Evolution pay-per-view, stylized in roman numerals — that she matched to Toni Storm. At Evolution, Ripley successfully defended the WWE NXT UK Women's Championship against Dakota Kai in a dark match. Along with WWE's first-ever all-women's pay-per-view, the day of October 28 also denotes the anniversary of Ripley's tryout with Australia's Riot City Wrestling promotion, which took place in 2012. For Ripley, the latter marks the beginning of her personal wrestling career, while the former marks the beginning of what Ripley calls the "women's evolution" in WWE.
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"It was a really special day," Ripley recalled. "It really was the start of my awesome career here within the WWE and my gradual change into 'The Nightmare,' 'The Eradicator,' the absolute brutality that you see today. Being in the tattoo chair was really thrilling. It definitely stung and I was a little bit thrown off with that, but I was also so excited to start this tattoo journey."
Capturing The Family Spirit
Rob Kim/Getty Images
Following her nod to WWE Evolution, Ripley's next tattoo centered on the familial bond she shared with her younger sister, Calista. As such, the pair of sisters were each inked with a pair of hands interlocking pinkies — an image symbolic of their "pinky promise" to eternal friendship. While Calista's hand tattoo is more petitely shaped, Ripley's are skeleton hands.
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"We're sisters for life. It doesn't matter how far we go in life or what the distance is between us. We're always going to be there for each other and we're always going to love each other," Ripley said. "So we just wanted to have some sort of memento of our love, pretty much."
Another family-related mark is a ceramic chicken jar, inked on the back of Ripley's arm in honor of her late grandmother. Growing up, Ripley often found her hand in a similar chicken-shaped jar placed in the kitchen or lounge room of her grandmother's house. Inside the jar laid a variety of candy, including a brand called Minties, which contained white, rectangular-shaped and mint-flavored pieces. During family reunions, Ripley, her sister, and her cousin Jordan usually played a mini-game where one would hide a Mintie somewhere in the room, while the other two searched for it. After her grandmother's passing in 2023, Ripley gained possession of the respective jar.
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"I felt like my other tattoos weren't really justifying exactly who she was and symbolizing who she was as like a little reminder to me. Everyone's like, 'Yo, what's up with the chicken? You have all these demon tattoos and all these cool tattoos, and then you got a chicken on your tricep. What the hell is that?' Once I tell them the story, they see how meaningful it actually is," Ripley said.
Tattoo Sessions With The Judgment Day
WWE
While a few of Ripley's tattoos are considered sentimental, she considers others to be random. Some of this randomness can be attributed to her former Judgment Day stablemates, including Dominik Mysterio and her sole-remaining ally Damian Priest.
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On the day of SummerSlam 2023, Ripley and Mysterio weren't expecting to be booked for the show, so the two made a spontaneous trip to a nearby tattoo parlor to get ghosts imprinted on their thumbs. For Ripley and Mysterio, the ghosts symbolized their status of not being booked on the SummerSlam card. In the midst of their tattoo appointments, though, Ripley and Mysterio received a call they were indeed needed for the show, specifically for a run-in during Finn Balor's WWE World Heavyweight Championship match against Seth Rollins.
Elsewhere, Ripley and Priest share some tattoo experiences in countries such as Germany and Mexico. While in Germany last year, Ripley memorialized the trip with a back-leg tattoo of an overflowing beer mug, accented by a skull. The date of the trip, October 28, 2023, was also branded beneath it. On her other leg, Ripley commemorated a 2022 Mexico tour with a sugar skull. The following year, Ripley added a crown to the head of the sugar skull as a metaphor of her potentially dethroning WWE SmackDown Women's Champion Charlotte Flair at WrestleMania 39.
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"I added the crown to it at WrestleMania 39 because I was being cheeky. I was like, 'I'm gonna get a crown because I'm going to take Charlotte Flair's crown,' so now I have a crown, and that's exactly what I did," Ripley said.
