Dominic Fike is talking me through his face tattoos. Specifically, the musician, actor and breakout star of Euphoria is telling me about how high he was when he got his first face tattoo at the age of 16. ‘It was a dipshit thing,’ he elaborates, schlumped in a chair in a New York photography studio. ‘I was weed-high. Which is not the time to get your first face tattoo.’
Mercy, no. But face tattoos were the style in south Florida rap at the time and Fike was part of a collective called Lame Boys ENT. So having ‘LBE’ permanently scarred on his forehead seemed like a good idea. Then the paranoia kicked in and with it, what military strategists term ‘mission creep’. He thought that LBE looked ‘weird’ and reasoned that the best course of action would be to get another face tattoo to distract from it. ‘This guy who was doing the tattoo, he didn’t even speak English, he had a MacBook and I was like: “Can you just put that on my face?” He said: “Are you sure?’’’ Which is how Dominic Fike came to have an apple tattoo on the underside of his right eye.
