This Megan Fox tattoo is a slightly altered version of a line from King Lear that reads:
No, no, no, no! Come, let’s away to prison.
We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too-
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out-
And take upon ‘s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies; and we’ll wear out,
In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by th’ moon.
I’m only ok on my Shakespeare, but here’s what I think is significant (correct me if I’m wrong, I haven’t read Lear in years): in this part of the play, Lear and his daughter Cordelia are prisoners. She wants to attempt to talk their way out of captivity; Lear responds with this line, proposing instead that they go willingly to prison and stay in their cage indefinitely, observing their beautiful surroundings while locked away, their captivity allowing them to outlast the shifts in power around them.
So then, to turn back to Megan Fox, what we have is a starlet known and commented upon almost exclusively for her looks, who ends up in roles that are dependent upon those looks, and who is rarely spoken of as a human entity beyond those looks. (Honestly, I’d argue that Michael Bay uses and films the female body in pretty much the exact same way that he uses and films really attractive cars.) And this person has a tattoo from a line that is literally about captivity, and about captivity within beauty, about captivity within a beautiful but ultimately only surface-valuable (gilded, yeah?) world, and about using, as best one can, the resources available within that captivity to ensure survival. About the triumph and continued existence of the self even within inescapable walls.
Anyway, also, the dictionaries I looked at listed an archaic meaning of “gilded” as “to make red, as with blood” or “to smear with blood,” which, I mean. Like.