14 DAY TRIAL // Kate Moss isn’t just one of the most famous and successful supermodels of our times, she might also be a walking piece of art. Her lower back tattoo, by German-born British painter Lucian Freud, could be worth a fortune, it has emerged.
As Shine Yahoo! notes, the tattoo might not be visible on the runway but it’s well known to fans mostly thanks to paparazzi shots, of Moss in a bathing suit on various occasions.
It’s of a pair of birds and was done after the two met in 2002. It was Freud who suggested it, with the model eagerly saying yes.
“He told me about when he was in the Navy, when he was 19 or something, and he used to do all of the tattoos for the sailors,” Moss says in a recent interview, as cited by the aforementioned media outlet.
“And I went, ‘Oh, my God, that's amazing.’ And he went, ‘I can do you one. What would you like?’ I was like, ‘Really?’” the model explains.
She eventually settled for a pair of birds.
“He said, ‘Would you like creatures of the animal kingdom?’ I said, ‘I like birds.’ And he said, ‘I've done birds. I've got it in my book.’ And he pointed at a painting of a chicken upside down in a bucket,” Moss further says.
“And I said, ‘No, I'm not having that.’ And then he said, ‘Maybe I should just do you.’ I thought, I'm not going to have a girl on my… So we decided to do a flock of birds,” she adds.
Freud also painted Moss, which went on to become one of his most famous works: he once said he was not “disappointed” with how it turned out but critics sure loved it.
Kate Moss by Lucian Freud shows the model pregnant with her daughter, completely nude, reclining on a bed. It’s worth £3.93 million ($6.25 million / €4.88 million).