Alan Belcher’s tattoo of Johnny Cash
By Jim Murphy July 12th, 2009Since everyone wants to see it according to Google we proudly present a picture of Alan Belcher’s tattoo. Belcher’s ink is one of the top trending UFC 100 searches on Google at the moment. It’s supposed to be Johnny Cash and while we have nothing but respect for ‘The Man In Black’, Belcher’s tattoo isn’t getting much love. One forum poster asked ‘Is that Johnny Cash or Rosie O’Donnell.’ Here’s what the ‘pound for pound’ best sportswriter on the planet Michael David Smith had to say about A.B’s ink:
Alan Belcher’s tattoo is raising a whole lot of questions in the hours after his split decision loss to Yoshihiro Akiyama at UFC 100, so let’s clear up what it is: It’s Johnny Cash. Except it’s a deformed Johnny Cash.
The tattoo looks to me like Belcher got it when he was younger, and through strength training he’s built up the muscles in his arms and made Johnny’s face look a little lumpy. That makes it, frankly, look like it’s a little bit deformed, with all due respect to Belcher. And that’s why no one can tell what it is, and everyone is googling “Alan Belcher tattoo.”
So why does Belcher have a Cash tattoo on his arm? I’ve never heard him go into much detail about it, other than he’s a Mississippi boy who’s a big Johnny Cash fan. Oddly, he didn’t use Johnny Cash for his entrance music, instead choosing Bob Dylan’s Hurricane.
Ironically, the real Johnny Cash’s face got ‘a little lumpy’ as he aged. As any Cash fan knows, what Belcher was going for was the iconic picture of him from the cover of ‘Johnny Cash: At Folsom Prison’. We’ll give you the Belcher tat and the original and let you make the call:
Alan Belcher tattoo: A Deformed Johnny Cash @ AOL Fanhouse
UPDATE: We’ll try to track down a better picture, but here’s a shot of Belcher during his fight with Akiyama at UFC 100:
And while we’re at it how about a video of Johnny Cash performing live at yet another prison, in this case San Quentin. We’ll reiterate what we’ve noted before–lest you doubt Cash’s credentials as a bad ass keep in mind that he took his pretty young wife into a prison with him **and the inmates treated her with respect**.
July 12th, 2009 at 7:46 am
[...] is interested in Alan Belcher’s tattoo today, and The Savage Science has a big feature on [...]
July 12th, 2009 at 7:50 am
[...] Alan Belcher tattoo [...]
July 12th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
At 2GuysTalking HQ last night (in between the sickening closed captioning and signal loss - Charter, you SUCK, officially), comments on Belcher’s tattoo included the thoughts below:
“Is it Kim Jung Il?”
“Isn’t it a tattoo of his opponent?”
“Is it Wayne Newton?”
“Is it his opponent’s decapitated head?”
“Is it, like a Sumo wrestler? What is that?”
“Maybe it’ll punch off? It was a poorly adhered rub on?”
“Maybe it’s a tattoo he got when he was a 20 pound weakling and now it’s fleshed out an indiscernable?”
“Is it Elvis?”
I guess if/when I get a tattoo on my body, I’ll at least have some “wow” or “boy that’s cool factor” rather than a “Wow, boy what the hell IS THAT” factor.
July 12th, 2009 at 10:10 pm
This pic was the 1st of 2 sessions on his tattoo…it is now finished and has a guitar added ….before you go bashing someones work why dont you get the details..the pic is an unfinished tattoo you are comparing to. Also Alan requested the tattoo be upright to cover up an old tattoo. so its also a cover up and his arms grow it shifts the contour of the face.
July 13th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
This pic was the 1st of 2 sessions on his tattoo…it is now finished and has a guitar added ….before you go bashing someones work why dont you get the details..the pic is an unfinished tattoo you are comparing to. Also Alan requested the tattoo be upright to cover up an old tattoo. so its also a cover up and his arms grow it shifts the contour of the face.
Thanks for the info–first of all we meant no disrespect of Belcher as a fighter. He’s one of our favorites and as you no doubt figured from our post we’re huge Johnny Cash fans as well. Our comment on the tat during our play by play was very complimentary–there’s no shortage of really lame ink in MMA, and we gave props to Belcher’s tat out of mutual respect for Cash and for it being something meaningful to him. We’re usually too busy calling fights to critique tattoos, but he deserves credit for not having a random kanji character or some other cliche copycat image.
Basically, we were looking over the various mainstream media feedback to UFC 100 and were somewhat puzzled that ‘Alan Belcher tattoo’ was among the top ten Google search terms on Sunday morning. We did a little research, and the information posted is based on that. I should have noted that its obviously an older picture of Belcher (that’s evident from his hair alone), and a professional fighter who trains all the time will no doubt have the issues with the arm growing that you speak of. Keep in mind that the types that lurk in certain MMA forums will bitch about anything–it just surprised us that his tattoo had generated so much online ‘buzz’ and we wanted to figure out why.
Also thanks for the info that its a cover up. We’ll try to get a better picture, but for now we’ve posted a shot from his fight against Akiyama on Saturday.
July 15th, 2009 at 7:01 pm
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February 7th, 2010 at 5:41 am
“The tattoo looks to me like Belcher got it when he was younger, and through strength training he’s built up the muscles in his arms and made Johnny’s face look a little lumpy.” well apparently “the best pound for pound sports writer” is not an mma or ufc fan, because alan belcher’s tattoo is fairly new and he did not have it for most of his ufc/mma fights, you would know this if you were in fact a good sports writer and not a f*cking tool pretending to know about mma.