Glier, Mike

The American boxer Mike Tyson has at least seven tattoos. Three—at least two of them prison tattoos—are portraits of men he respects: tennis player Arthur Ashe, Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara, and Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong. Tyson's face tattoo, influenced by the Māori style tā moko, was designed and inked by S. Victor Whitmill in 2003; Tyson associates it with the Māori being warriors and has called it his "warrior tattoo", a name that has also been used in the news media. Tyson's three other tattoos depict a tiger, his ex-wife Monica Turner, and his late daughter Exodus. Tyson's face tattoo quickly proved iconic and has become strongly associated with him. Its Māori influence has been controversial, spurring claims of cultural appropriation. In 2011, Whitmill filed a copyright suit against Warner Bros. for using the design on the character Stu Price in The Hangover Part II. Warner Bros. responded with a number of defenses, including that tattoos are not copyrightable; supporting them, scholar David Nimmer argued that it violated the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution—which prohibits slavery—to give Whitmill copyright over part of Tyson's body. After...