Championship belts may be fleeting, but tattoos are forever.
Fresh off winning the UFC Bantamweight title with a second round TKO of Aljamain Sterling, “Suga” Sean O’Malley announced that he might “get ‘champ’ on my face somewhere,” during a post-fight press conference. Many may have speculated that this was nothing more than the bluster associated with the euphoria of finally winning the belt, but if you know any thing about O’Malley, you know the man is true to his word.
Sean O’Malley added a face tattoo for becoming champ pic.twitter.com/5BlL0KGKpd
— Bloody Elbow (@BloodyElbow) August 27, 2023
While the picture above appears to be mostly stencil (at least the crown does), you can see the full tattoo in the video down below.
At the end of the video, O’Malley bellows out, “Good morning, the champ is here!” while we get a glimpse of the tattoo in the very early stages of healing. In other words, if you thought it was a joke when the photo only had stencil, here’s the proof that O’Malley actually followed through with the tattoo. For those of you who may be a little challenged when it comes to Roman numerals, the tattoo says, “Champ/2023.” Marcéllo Stefaniak appears to be the tattoo artist who did the work. Stefaniak has tattooed O’Malley in the past, most recently he inked “dreamer” over O’Malley’s left eyebrow.
A few months back, Chuck Mindenhall interviewed O’Malley for our cover feature. From what O’Malley had to say then it was never a matter of “will he win a championship?” but a question of “when?”
“It’s inevitable that I’m going to be a world champion,” O’Malley says. “You can go back and watch the interviews during that Contender Series five years ago. I was saying everything that’s pretty much been happening. I’m going to go out, create a highlight reel, and just keep building. The ultimate goal is to be the pay-per-view king.”
O’Malley is a UFC world champion, and nobody is ever going to be able to take that away from him. And unless they find a way to pin him down and give him laser removal, that Champ tattoo is here to stay.
