Billie Eilish unveils huge new back tattoo

Billie Eilish has unveiled a dramatic new back tattoo, sparking mixed reactions from fans as they tried to decode the design.

The US pop star, 21. shared a photograph of the black geometric design on her back on Instagram on Wednesday (18 October), after first teasing it on social media last month. The photograph appeared to have been taken at tattoo artist Matias Milan’s studio, with the ink still smeared on her back.

Some social media users compared the tattoo to a Stranger Things “portal” referring to the Duffer brothers’ hit Netflix show, while others declared it “looks absolutely killer” in the comments section.

“I see she’s in her ‘I’m a celebrity and do wild s*** phase.’ Go girl go,” one person wrote.

Other pictures in the collection of photos Eilish posted online include a screenshot of lyrics from Drake’s song with Lil’ Yachty “Another Late Night”, which includes a reference to her.

The body art, which begins at the nape of her neck and stretches the length of her spine, marks Eilish’s fourth tattoo.

The singer previously revealed three fairies tattooed on her hand at the premiere of Daniel Craig’s final outing as James Bond, No Time To Die, in September 2021. The Grammy-winner performed the film’s theme, co-written with her brother Finneas O’Connell.

Eilish subsequently picked this tattoo of “sweet little guardian angel fairies” as her favourite, responding to a fan question on her Instagram Stories. In an interview with Vanity Fair the same year, the singer said the fairies were from a book “that I had growing up” called Fairyopolis.

Eilish’s second tattoo was of a dragon on her right thigh, with the “Happier Than Ever” telling Rolling Stone she had gotten that one in November 2020. However, she didn’t share any pictures of the ink on social media, with fans first first catching a glimpse of it in pictures for a British Vogue cover story in May 2021.

While she hasn’t elaborated on the significance of the dragon tattoo, the matte-black Dodge Challenger car she received on her 17th birthday is nicknamed “the Dragon”.

The singer, whose full name is Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell, got her middle name “Eilish” tattooed on her chest in a gothic font on 27 January 2020 – one day after her Grammy Awards triumph, with Eilish winning five out of the six categories she was nominated for that year.