14 DAY TRIAL // Dolly Parton would sit down with you and talk openly about any topic of your choosing, be it her love life, her beliefs on marriage equality, or the inspiration for her music, but one thing she would not own up to is the fact that she has her breasts and arms covered in secret tattoos.
This is actually an urban legend that has been around for many, many years but, for some reason, it’s resurfacing again, as Jezebel can confirm. You can chalk it up to fun celebrity trivia: your favorite country icon, who at 68 looks as if she was frozen in time at least 2 decades ago, is covered in ink on her upper body.
Of course, if you’re a fan of Dolly, you must know that she denied this report at least on a couple of occasions. Not that it’s helping with making it go away: if she really did cover her breasts in tattoos to hide the scars from her many plastic surgeries, would she really rush to confirm that this was the case? Our guess is not.
The first actual piece of evidence of Dolly’s love of body ink emerged in 1996 when, during an interview with Jay Leno, he noticed a little something peeking from the cutout of the dress on her arm. As Dolly was speaking, Jay quite ceremoniously pulled on the dress to have a better look at the tat, of which she said it was a little angel and a butterfly – her guardian angel, she called it.
Then, in 2003, Jennifer Saunders spoke about the time she saw Dolly’s tattoos for the first time. She said they were in a restaurant and Dolly simply opened her top and, not having a bra on, offered her a very good look at “the most beautiful angels and beautiful butterflies and baskets of flowers in pastel-colored tattoos,” covering her huge breasts completely.
She also said that Dolly told her not to tell anyone about it so, in true Hollywood fashion, she went ahead and put it in her book.
Roseanne Barr confirmed the story in a 2011 interview, saying Parton had “all these awesome tattoos all over her body.” Barr swore she’d seen them with her own eyes and described her in a manner similar to Saunders’, saying they were not black or blue tats, but done in very beautiful pastel colors.
A few years earlier, in 2006, Dolly accidentally flashed one such tattoo at a movie premiere, when she bent in front of photographers and something like a rose petal was seen between her breasts, low enough to be hidden by the cut of the dress (pictured above), but not low enough not to peek out if she bent down.
Jezebel has the photo. Of course, as it went viral, the singer issued a denial, saying it had been doctored to show something that was never there.
You might have noticed that, for some years, Dolly is always covering her hands either with fingerless gloves or with a flesh-colored undergarment similar to pantyhose. Many assumed she did that because, despite her many plastic surgeries, her hands still betrayed her real age but the aforementioned outlet believes it’s because she’s hiding her sleeve tattoos.