Charley Hull almost got a phrase tattooed on her forehead at 17
Eight lines from the top of the world rankings, three tattoos, and a story that would make any tattoo artist chuckle. English golfer Charley Hull, who turned 30 this year, recalled in an interview with Golfweek how at seventeen she got drunk in Ibiza and was about to get the phrase “Hold Tight” tattooed on her forehead. Her friend James talked her out of it at the last moment, and the inscription ended up on her foot. The story sounds like a joke, but in fact, it’s a clear illustration of how the most “impulsive” works are born in tattoo culture and why they cause mixed feelings for years.
Hull herself recounts the evening like this: she and James, her best friend, were going clubbing, and on the way back to the hotel, she had what she called a “brilliant idea” – to get a tattoo across her head. The phrase “Hold tight, hold tight” was their shared favorite, something they constantly said to each other. James stopped her from getting it on her forehead and convinced her to get it on her foot. James himself now has a matching inscription on his arm.
The funniest part of this story is the morning after. Hull woke up with a hangover, remembered nothing, and saw a plastic bag on James’s leg. “Damn, was I that drunk yesterday?” she asked her friend. He replied that it was the wrapper from the tattoo, and that she had actually had to be stopped from getting it on her forehead. So, the classic scenario: a decision made in a state you later want to erase from your biography, and the mark remains on your body.
Hull has three tattoos in total, and each one has its own story. Here’s how they look:
- On her foot – the inscription “hold tight,” the very “Ibiza” one, done at 17.
- On her wrist – the name of her ex-husband, English MMA fighter John “Ozzy” Smith. Hull admits she’s trying to get rid of it.
- On her right pinky finger – a lightning bolt, matching her best friend and teammate Georgia Hall’s lightning bolt. The girls call it their “pinky promise” – a promise on the pinky, like in childhood.
Hull says briefly about the lightning bolts: “We are electric together, we have each other’s backs.” This is perhaps the most honest answer to why people get matching tattoos. In tattoo culture, matching designs aren’t about symmetry, but about ritual: two people fix a connection on their bodies, and it becomes something more “tangible” than just words. The lightning bolt on the pinky finger works precisely as such a marker – small, almost hidden, but theirs, for themselves.
The story with her ex-husband’s name, however, is about another facet of tattoo culture that the industry has been exploring more confidently in recent years: removal. Tattooing used to be a life sentence, and an ex-husband’s name on a wrist would remain forever. Now, laser removal and permanent makeup cover-ups have become a full-fledged service, and more and more people are coming to studios specifically to “cleanse” their past. Hull openly talks about trying to remove Smith’s name, and there’s nothing shameful about it – bodies change, relationships end, and a tattoo made at the peak of emotions starts to feel burdensome. This is one of the most frequent requests in the tattoo industry, and the fact that a public athlete talks about it openly only normalizes the topic.
A separate layer of Hull’s story is about how she quit smoking and vaping. She explains that smoking is more prevalent in England than people think, and a couple of years ago, due to stress, she was prescribed Xanax. The feeling that she might become addicted to them made her throw away the pills and look for something that would “smooth out” her state. That’s how vaping came about, and then cigarettes, because at least with them you could go outside instead of smoking indoors. Now, Hull has been using on! nicotine pouches for a year and a half and says it’s “pretty easy” for her to quit because she’s “strong in these things.” She also recalls that she was diagnosed with ADHD precisely during the period she was on Xanax.
If we set aside the sports context and look at all this through the lens of tattoo culture, Hull’s story reveals an entire evolution. A teenage impulsive inscription, made while intoxicated and on someone else’s “let’s do it,” is a classic of the genre that almost everyone starts with. A matching lightning bolt with a friend signifies a transition to a conscious, “ritualistic” tattoo, where the design carries meaning, not just the emotion of the moment. And the ex-husband’s name that one wants to erase is a stage where the body ceases to be a canvas for others’ feelings and becomes a space that a person consciously begins to edit. Tattoo culture has long ceased to be about “forever and no room for error” – today, it’s more about how a person manages their story on their own skin, adding and erasing as life itself changes.
Hull, by the way, is in the thick of the season these days: at the end of September, she played in the Walmart NW Arkansas Championship at Pinnacle Country Club in Rogers, Arkansas, and even earlier, in May 2024, she was filmed at the U.S. Women’s Open at Lancaster Country Club. This means the tattoos on her foot and pinky finger are not just personal scars but part of the image of an athlete seen by millions. And the fact that she’s not ashamed of either the “Ibiza” inscription or her attempt to remove her ex-husband’s name makes her story one of the most vivid examples of how tattoo culture lives in the public space today: without pretentiousness, with self-irony, and with the right to make mistakes.