
For an upcoming ad campaign for her new sandal line Ipanema, Gisele Bundchen was covered head-to-toe fake tattoos. The print ads will appear in fashion magazines this winter. You can see more here. (Beware, the website has the most annoying music ever)

Fans have been begging their favorite celebrities to autograph body parts for years. But recently it’s become increasingly popular for fans such as this Paul Weller partisan, to make those autographs permanent by having them tattooed onto the skin. The practice spans across the celebrity spectrum, from fans of major stars like Angelina Jolie to rabid devotees of lesser lights such as Weller and Adam Ant.
If you have a tattoo of a celebrity autograph, drop us a note and a snap at getinked@inkedblog.com
An article in today's Daily Mirror in the U.K. caught our eye, as the paper reported that Louis Molloy, the tattoo artist who's done nine of footballer David Beckham's now famous tats, is now threatening to sue Beckham if and when Beckham shows the tattoos in an ad campaign.
If Molloy does sue, claiming he owns the copyright of the images on Beckham's body, he'd be following the lead of Matthew Reed, the Oregon based tattoo artist who inked NBA star Rasheed Wallace's arm. Reed is also suing for copyright infringement claiming that he's due money now that Rasheed's tattoo is featured prominently in a Nike TV and Internet ad campaign.
Is there a trend here?
Molloy is quoted in the article in the Mirror as saying about Beckham - "They were under the impression that they owned those images but they don't. I was contacted recently and told they wanted to use some of them in a campaign. I said we'd have to draw up a licence agreement but then it got too complicated. So I said 'I own the copyright, they are my intellectual property, I drew them, I didn't copy them from other sources'. They still think they're the owners of the images but if they use them without my permission I'd sue. There's no doubt about it."
The article suggests that Molloy is firm in his assertion that he alone created Beckham's famous guardian angel on his back. He says - "David described a tattoo he'd seen of an upright figure, along the lines of a crucifix. I decided on the image of a diver at the Olympics standing on the high board with his arms outstretched. I couldn't find a relevant picture so I got an book on anatomy and basically pieced it all together. I added a pair of wings, showed the design to him and he loved it."
You can read the article online here.
