Cody Rhodes calls the neck tattoo that became his emblem the greatest regret of his life, and thinks his father would have been appalled by it.
The subject came up late in his conversation with Santino Marella on What Do You Wanna Talk About, when Rhodes asked his guest where he ranked his own neck tattoo among his collection. Marella recalled a joke made at Ric Flair’s roast that used Rhodes’ ink as the punchline at Vickie Guerrero’s expense, adding that he is fond of Guerrero and that Flair had been unhappy with the comedians for going after the women in the room.
Rhodes had not heard it, and did not defend himself.
“I stand by the fact that I think the work is great and the artist is great, but I also will reveal, as I think I’ve revealed on this pod before, the neck tattoo I would widely consider the greatest regret of my life.”
Marella sounded surprised. Rhodes did not soften it.
“Oh yeah. And you know what? I’ll live with it. We’re gonna rock this till the very end.”
The problem, as he tells it, was scale. He had approved a design and expected something considerably smaller than what he got.
“What I thought was it was like here, and it was like this, and then when I saw it, and it was in my jaw, and it was so big, my life changed looking in a mirror.”
Then the line that will travel.
“If my dad was to come back to life, he would not say congrats. He would lose his s***. You’ve ruined yourself.”
Dusty Rhodes died in June 2015, four years and eight months before the tattoo appeared.
Rhodes has told parts of this story before. He has said the artist was working to a deadline that forced a choice between doing it months out or two days before a show, that he was not paying close enough attention, and that Tony Khan told him there was no way it was going on his neck. He has also described walking into a production meeting afterwards and finding Jim Ross and the rest of the room staring at it rather than listening to anything being said.
The tattoo is the American Nightmare logo, a skull with wings and a crown in the colors of the United States flag, and it covers most of one side of his neck. He debuted it on February 29, 2020, at AEW Revolution, in a match against MJF. The reaction online was immediate and largely hostile, and it has not shifted much in six years. His wife, Brandi Rhodes, said publicly at the time that she was the one person who did not like it. He was careful not to write the whole thing off, and admitted the relationship is not simple.
“I say it’s the greatest regret of my life, but it also, it’s proved, it’s had some very beneficial elements of it. I don’t know. It’s complicated. Best way to put it. My relationship with my tattoo.”
Marella, whose own neck tattoo is for his daughter Bianca, said Rhodes is the reason he got a more recent piece on his hand, a crown for his wife Anna. All of Marella’s tattoos are for his children or his wife, including a wolf for his son.
Rhodes closed the exchange with a challenge for anybody who follows this closely enough. He described a wrestler who got a Brahma bull tattooed on his arm as a Rock fan before he broke into the business, realized it belonged to somebody else, and had a panther inked over the top of it. He would not name him.
“Find that wrestler, look at that panther, and you can see it. You can see what’s under.”
Rhodes lost the Undisputed WWE Championship to Sami Zayn at Night of Champions and failed to regain it from CM Punk at SummerSlam, after Randy Orton returned and hit him with an RKO.
