Joel Kinnaman has made a name for himself with a diverse list of roles, from Danish crime drama “The Killing” to Hollywood movies such as “RoboCop” and “Suicide Squad”. Does the Swedish star have tattoos?
Joel Kinnaman has several tattoos. He was married to a Cleo Wattenström, a Swedish tattoo artist, between 2015 and 2018, and was spotted at the beach with extensive tattoo work. He was also tattooed by Will Smith on the set of “Suicide Squad”, though this was less artistically polished.
For more on Joel Kinnaman’s tattoos and the story behind probably his worst one, keep reading.
Kinnaman’s Tattoos
The tattoos on Kinnaman’s arms are clearly visible in many of the actor’s social media posts. While it isn’t clear whether or not he has other, hidden tattoos, we can see he has a lot of ink on his upper arms.
He might be keeping his lower arms free of tattoos to protect Hollywood makeup teams from extra work or perhaps his tattoos simply haven’t spread that far yet.
Although Kinnaman’s tattoos are visible in so many posts, the complexity of the tattooing makes it difficult to clearly see what they are.
He does have a tattoo of a house, with a few buildings in the background, on his right upper arm.
The house’s design is noticeably Scandanavian, so it’s possible this location is somewhere significant from Kinnaman’s past, perhaps his childhood home, although this is purely speculation.
There is also a paragraph or verse of text written above the imagery but there’s no clear photo of it (and it’s likely in Swedish anyway).
Kinnaman was married to a Swedish tattoo artist, Cleo Wattenström, for two years. It isn’t clear whether Cleo was the person to provide the majority of Kinnaman’s tattoos, or whether the couple’s initial attraction was partly due to a mutual love of the art form.
Suicide Squad Tattoo
During the making of 2016’s “Suicide Squad”, Margot Robbie introduced a tattoo gun to the shoot. Robbie had apparently purchased the tattoo gun from eBay and used it to tattoo a friend at their bachelorette party.
To commemorate working on the film together, Robbie tattooed various members of the cast with a “SKWAD” (a phonetic spelling of Squad) tattoo. Though Robbie’s tattooing skill was evidently lacking, leading her to hang up the tattoo gun for good, she wasn’t the only amateur artist on the set.
Joel Kinnaman received his “SKWAD” tattoo at the hands of Will Smith, resulting in a tattoo so shaky that made Robbie’s attempts look professional in comparison. In an Instagram post revealing his new tattoo to the world, Kinnaman wrote that watching Smith at work “was like watching a drunk baby fly a helicopter”.
To rub salt in Kinnaman’s wound, Smith refused to let Kinnaman return the favor by tattooing him, in Joel’s words “he pulled his Will Smith card”. While we can’t know for sure that Kinnaman would have fared better than Smith, being married to a tattoo artist at the time probably gave him some advantage over a complete novice.
The “SKWAD” tattoo has since been surrounded by new tattoos, however, Kinnaman has seemingly been happy to leave Smith’s handiwork untouched. Rather than tattooing over the sloppy text, Kinnaman still displays his permanent reminder of the time that, again in his words, he let a 47-year-old man without his reading glasses tattoo him.
So Joel Kinnaman definitely has tattoos, although it’s fair to say that some are of a higher and lower quality than others. Still, it isn’t always the artistry of a tattoo that is important but also what it represents.
Even if Margot Robbie’s tattoo gun didn’t create any stunning works of body art, at least the cast of “Suicide Squad” will each have stories to tell about the unique way they got their tattoos.