Lady Gaga: 5 tattoos, 2 personas, and a strict father. Why does Gaga ink only the left side of her body? The whole truth about her relationship with a dad who sees a “half-normal Marilyn Monroe” on the right and a “crazy Iggy Pop” on the left.
Lady Gaga lives by the tenets of Andy Warhol, considers herself a die-hard futurist and a bit of a robot. She was also the brightest pop star of 2009. Still, for people poring over her photos, that’s probably the last thing they care about.
Lady Gaga is one of the most striking and controversial performers on today’s stage, yet—as she openly tells magazines and TV networks—she’s also a good, obedient daughter to her parents. It turns out she can be not only an extravagant artist but also a devoted daughter.
The 25-year-old star maintains a fairly close relationship with her parents. Recently, the singer revealed a secret about her tattoos. She admitted she got deeply into tattoo culture, but all her designs are placed only on the left side of her body. You can get a detailed look at Gaga’s tattoos in the video for “Bad Romance.”
At the moment, she has five tattoos:
- A “peace” sign inked in honor of John Lennon.
- An intricate floral ornament on her lower back.
- A small bouquet of daisies on her shoulder.
- A unicorn head on her thigh.
- A quote from Rainer Maria Rilke and the inscription “Little Monsters,” dedicated to her fans, on the inside of her arm.
Knowing Lady Gaga’s character, it’s safe to assume she won’t stop there, and the number of tattoos will likely grow. According to the artist, this is also because she wants to remain an obedient daughter to her father, who dreams of seeing her at least “halfway normal.”
“I don’t want to upset him,” Lady Gaga says. “So if he looks at me from the right side, I’m completely normal. My dad says that from one side I remind him of Marilyn Monroe, and from the other—of Iggy Pop.”
Gaga’s dad hasn’t always been a fan of his daughter’s cult status—especially back when his half-naked girl started performing in New York cabarets six months after graduating from college.
“I sang in leopard-print thongs and a black crop top,” Gaga recalls. “My dad really thought I’d lost it. And he didn’t mean anything like, ‘She’s provoking me,’ ‘She’s a bad girl,’ or ‘She’s a prostitute.’ Dad concluded that something was wrong with my head because he thought I was doing drugs and had lost touch with reality. In short, he believed I had unsolvable psychological problems.”
For a while, father and daughter didn’t speak, and Gaga found the situation unbearable.
“What personal success can there be if your own father calls and says, ‘Do you even have your head on straight—what the hell are you doing?’ If someone had come up to me and said, ‘You’re a dirty slut, your music makes me sick, you’re talentless,’ it would have meant absolutely nothing to me. Nothing! But if my father had said anything like that, I would have been crushed.”
Now the artist’s dad is always around his daughter—after all, few people are upset by a major label contract.
“He loves me because I’m always exactly who I really am,” Gaga reflects. “When I grab a guy’s butt on set, my dad cracks up. He thinks I’m wonderful! If he didn’t like my image, I’d invent another Lady Gaga.”
Gaga’s relationship with her mother is also quite trusting. According to Gaga, her bare-bottom performances passed Mom’s trust test, and she delivered a comprehensive tirade:
“My little girl, you can do anything you want. I’m always with you. You are beautiful, you are talented, and sooner or later you will run this whole world.”
It’s reported that Gaga’s mother is concerned about the excessive physical and mental strain her daughter endures, as well as her endless diets to look amazing—the latest of which supposedly involves drinking a lot and eating very little. From now on, the singer’s mother will personally keep an eye on her to make sure nothing threatens her health.
