It appears as though Taika Waititi has made his love for his wife Rita Ora permanent with fresh ink ostensibly dedicated to the 32-year-old British singer whom he not so secretly married last year.
In an Instagram post on Wednesday, the Thor: Love and Thunder star shared a video of the tattoo’s initial stencil — a simply letter “R” in a gothic font — as well as a photo of the finished product.
“I love Rugby,” Waititi tongue-in-cheek captioned the post, tagging Winter Stone, the Los Angeles tattoo artist to the stars who inked him. (“What does it stand for??? Always good seeing you brother,” Stone added in his own post.)
Though the couple wed in August 2022, Ora only recently confirmed that they had married in a private ceremony in London during a radio show to promote her new single last month.
“Yes. Here we are,” said Ora when asked about the rumors. “They say everything happens for a reason. I am officially off the market, people.”
“It was just nice and perfect … completely how I wanted it,” she added. “But I did wanna play on the fact that I’ve chosen to keep it kind of more private, this sort of experience that I had, and just to myself a bit more, but I did wanna play on what could have been, so this is what I’m giving to the public on what could have been.”
Waititi and Ora have been linked since May 2021, when paparazzi photos went viral that seemed to indicated that the pair were in some sort of “throuple” situation with Tessa Thompson. Ora likewise just only recently dismissed the so-called scandal as “ridiculous” and “absurd.”
“I just chose to not acknowledge that because it’s ridiculous,” Ora told British GQ. “I think when some things are so absurd, and it’s hard to fathom any sense of it, you just have to ignore it. I’ve taken that approach for a lot of things, because you don’t want to put energy towards something that’s nonexistent. It’s like trying to explain something that didn’t happen means you’re feeding into nothing.”
Ora likened the incident to a “situation where you’ve had a lot of drinks and everyone’s your best friend,” adding that Waititi and Thompson had a crazy shooting schedule and everyone was just letting loose.
It’s unclear if the already moderately inked Ora has returned the favor, but if not one would have to imagine that it’s only a matter of time.