Tattoos with typos are more common than you might think — even and especially among celebrities. Ariana Grande famously got “small charcoal grill” tattooed on her hand in Japanese — definitely not what she was going for — and several other celebrities have permanently marked themselves with foreign words that they believed to be different foreign words. But sometimes stars get lettering tattoos in their own native language wrong, too, like Cara Delevingne did last fall.
As you may recall, the model and actor got a new upper arm tattoo in September 2023 that quickly garnered criticism from eagle-eyed fans. Italian tattoo artist Matteo Nangeroni created a beautiful dot-work piece of a mask-like, incomplete face amid an abstract, geometric shape that hovers above the following words: “dormiveglia: (n.) the place that stretches between sleeping and walking.” Unfortunately, dormiveglia is the Italian word for the place between sleeping and waking.
Instagram/Cara Delevingne
Delevingne has done a masterful job keeping the accidental L hidden from public view over the last few months, either by wearing sleeves or long gloves over the error, or simply by posing with her left arm away from the camera. But at the Olivier Awards in London on April 14, the current star of the West End revival of Cabaret wore a sleeveless, sequined Gucci gown that showed off her tattoo — and the clever correction that has been made to it.
At first glance, you might not even notice a difference. But Delevingne seems to have recently returned to a tattoo artist — it’s unknown whether she went back to Nangeroni — to have an additional abstract shape that echoes the original geometric linework added. And the line happens to cut right through the words to cover up the superfluous L in “walking” so it now reads as “waking.” (It also cuts through “stretches,” even though that wasn’t misspelled — just a little artistic license.)
