Blake Griffin came into the league in 2009 with no tattoos. In the past year, he’s added three of them. In the summer of 2016, a beach photo of Blake Griffin showed his first tattoo, a landscape across his ribcage. This week, a Lee Jenkins profile of Griffin in Sports Illustrated described a second tattoo, this one on his wrist:
A clue [to the player’s free agency decision] happens to be tattooed in small block letters on his left wrist: stay.
The tattoo is a nod to his parents, Gail and Tommy, who seemed to put that verb in front of every sentence: Stay focused. Stay hungry. Stay humble. When Gail and Tommy arrived in Los Angeles after the 2009 draft, they knew only one thing about the Clippers. “The curse,” Gail laughs. “You kept hearing that word.”
Later in the text, Jenkins describes another text tattoo, this one on the right side of his torso, as seen in the photo above:
Griffin has one other tattoo, a quote from high school teammate Wilson Holloway inked on his side. When Holloway was a junior in college, he needed a new computer and Griffin sent him one. Holloway wrote him a thank-you note that included the advice: “Just keep smiling.” A couple weeks later, three days before the dunk contest, Holloway died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Griffin thinks about him often.
“One other tattoo” is incorrect as Jenkins didn’t discuss Griffin’s first tattoo, the landscape. The artist for this tattoo, Dr. Woo, posted a detailed photo on his Instagram last summer:
