Black Veil Brides’ Frontman Andy Biersack may have constructed a perfectly disheveled Motley Crue-meets-Kiss stage look, but his approach to tattoos is far less calculated. “I don’t pay much attention, as you can see from all the random patchwork I’ve drunkenly got,” he says. “I’m not the guy with a bunch of great artwork. For me, it’s about little stories that convey times in my life. I’ll just continue to piece together what I can for the rest of my life, and see where that ends up.”
01. Skull & Heart - “This was my first tattoo, which I got for a girl I was dating when I was 15. It’s part of Alkaline Trio, part random shit… and part Hitler hair. I actually have no idea why it has Hitler hair. I only realized it looked like that years after I got it.”
02. Koala Bear - “I recently got this done on the road. It’s a koala bear dressed like me drinking Seagram’s 7 Crown whiskey, which is just pure silliness.”
03. Unfinished Batman - “I got this unfinished Batman tattoo in a Laundromat. We were on tour and a buddy of mine started talking about how he does tattoos. I was like. ‘Let’s do it.’ But there was nowhere to go except for a 24-hour Laundromat across from our hotel. We started at about 5 A.M. and worked until bus call later that day. It’s not a terrible tattoo either. It could get good.”
04. Inverted Cross - “I like both antireligious and traditional Catholic imagery. I’m not religious, but I understand the need for faith and hope. My inverted cross is a jarring image, and I like to leave its meaning up to interpretation. Plus, when I’m singing, my arm is up, so you can never really tell which way it’s facing.”
05. “BVB” Wings - “This was the first tattoo we all got together as a band, during our first headlining tour.”
06. Misfits and Danzig Skulls - “The Misfits skull was my second tattoo, and the Danzig was my third. I got [the latter] at a house party in some ghetto neighborhood in Cleveland with these crazy speed-freak meth heads that were blasting the worse kind of ICP [Insane Clown Posse] metal and drinking moonshine. I had a Danzig wallet and I wanted the logo, so the guy drew it up. And now it’s with me forever.”
07. Batman logo - “This makes me think of my family, because I had Batman stuff all over my house growing up.”
08. Azrael - “Azrael is the avenging angel [in the Batman: Knightfallseries] that came in when [the series’ villain] Bane broke Bruce Wayne’s back. My dad and I both have this tattoo: He has the older version of Azrael, I have the younger. It’s significant because when my dad was younger he played in bands until he injured his back.”
09. “FP” - “This is my shining star of tattoos. ‘FP’ stands for ‘front poop,’ and that’s what my dick and balls look like in the spandex pants I wear onstage. So basically FP is my tribute to my own dick and balls. My tour manager, who does my regular fornt-poop checks, came up with that name. He also has that tattoo, so he is paying tribute to them, too. The term is his - but the actual front poop is mine.”