In the March 12 episode of FX’s Love Story, John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette head back to reality after their blissful honeymoon abroad. “You’re not sick of me after those two weeks?” John asks his wife.
Carolyn jokes, “Yes, those matching tattoos we got was my way of telling you I need a little space.”
But did Kennedy and Bessette really get matching tattoos? While it’s impossible to know for sure, various sources have reported on the couple’s alleged ink.
A Sweet Souvenir?
Love Story is inspired by Elizabeth Beller’s 2024 book, Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, which, in turn, references the tattoo story first told to biographer C. David Heymann for his book American Legacy: The Story of John and Caroline Kennedy.
Here, a club manager named Emil Gabron recalled gifting the newlyweds a bottle of champagne and befriending them on their honeymoon in Istanbul, Turkey. Gabron claimed that Kennedy and Bessette actually invited his family to visit their home in New York, where they reportedly revealed that they’d gotten shamrock tattoos on their butts back in Istanbul.
As Beller told Town & Country of the claim, “I was surprised by that, but I also wasn’t because you don’t know them despite all the pictures that we see all the time.”
Indeed, Beller explained that one of the standout elements from her research was the pair’s playful side. “She had this great sense of humor, which doesn’t come across in the photographs, and John and Carolyn would laugh together all the time,” she said. “She also did that with friends, and I mean the kind of laughing where you’ve just got tears running down your face. It was a nice thing to be able to put in the book that I didn’t quite know that I was going to be able to get to.”
JFK Jr.’s Workout Accessory
A separate tattoo claim appears in 2024’s JFK Jr.: An Intimate Oral Biography, which was penned by journalist Liz McNeil and Kennedy’s executive assistant-slash-George chief of staff, RoseMarie Terenzio.
In the book, Brian Steel (Kennedy’s friend and fellow assistant district attorney) claimed that after a post-Frisbee shower, he spotted a shamrock tattoo on Kennedy’s back.
Terenzio also personally claimed Kennedy had a shamrock above his shoulder blade, and while it’s a little hard to make out, several photos of Kennedy exercising outdoors do seem to show a small marking there.
Kennedy’s reported ink is fairly limited, but Paul Anthony Kelly — who plays him on Love Story — has quite a few tattoos IRL (30 in total, per GQ). In fact, while filming, he spent most of his time in the hair-and-makeup chair on tattoo cover-up, he shared with Interview.
