Matt Damon and his wife, Lucy, found a creative way to commemorate the life of their late friend, Heath Ledger.
The actor opened up about his collection of body art for the first time in an interview with GQ published on Wednesday, revealing that the names of his four daughters—Alexia, Isabella, Gia, and Stella—which are inked at the top of his right arm actually weren’t his first tattoos. “She just announced it,” Damon explains of his wife’s unilateral decision to get tattooed one day in 2013. “We were in our apartment in Manhattan, and she was, like, ‘We’re getting tattoos.’ I was, ‘Okay.’” He adds that his only stipulation was that they fulfill a promise he once made to a friend. “There is a friend of ours who did all of Heath Ledger’s tattoos,” the Good Will Hunting star said, “and I told him if I ever got a tattoo, he was my first phone call.” So he called up tattoo artist Scott Campbell who biked over from Brooklyn and freehanded the name “Lucy” on his arm. That same day, Damon also got a tattoo of “a strange loopy line heading up toward his shoulder.”
The Oscar winner explained, “That’s something that Heath had on his arm. Heath was an incredibly restless, creative person. Like, I talked to the person who did his hair on The Patriot and she said he hated sitting still so much ‘that by the time I got the wig on and I set it and everything, and I’d finished, he’d get up and there would be a sculpture of bobby pins that he’d done.’ He was really sensitive. This stuff just flowed out of him. He was really special. I just wanted to get something that Heath had. Scott showed me his laptop and I said, ‘Scott, what’s that one?’ And he goes ‘I have no idea—I think that’s just some shit that Heath squiggled.’ And I went, ‘That’s the one I want.’” Damon’s wife, who was friends with Ledger as well, got the same squiggle tattooed on her foot. “So we both have that,” Damon says. “It’s like a little creative little blessing. It’s like an angel that looks over all these names that are on the arm.”
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