Time keeps moving forward, but Dolly Parton stays largely the same. The country music icon has sported the same bleach-blonde locks (via wigs) for actual decades, maintained dedicated to charitable giving (see her Imagination Library, top-tier perks for Dollywood employees, and funding research related to the COVID-19 vaccine), and has a seemingly unflappable cheerful attitude. She also hasn't been seen without long sleeves in years, and Scarlett Johansson thinks she knows why.
At the world premiere of her new movie Fly Me to the Moon in New York City Monday night, Johansson told People that she believes in science…and that Dolly Parton is inked to high heaven.
The new movie, in which Channing Tatum co-stars, has to do with conspiracy theories around the moon landing—presumably, is how Johansson got on the topic of highly specific beliefs that have very little evidence behind them.
“I’m so not a conspiracy theorist,” she said. “I'm like, I really believe in science. I don't know. I think probably that Dolly Parton has full tattooed sleeves.”
Does she know something we don’t? Probably not, judging by her caveat.
“Is it real?” she said. “We’ll find out.”
Back in 2017, Parton confirmed to Vanity Fair that she is in fact sporting ink, though the public has never seen her body art.
“I don’t really like to make a big to-do of [the tattoos] because people make such a big damn deal over every little thing,” she said. “But most of the tattoos, when I first started, I was covering up some scars that I had, ‘cause I have a tendency to have keloid scar tissue, and I have a tendency where if I have any kind of scars anywhere then they kind of have a purple tinge that I can never get rid of. So mine are all pastels, what few that I have, and they’re meant to cover some scars. I’m not trying to make some big, bold statement.”
In 2020, she told People that she doesn’t self-identify as a “tattoo girl,” despite being a girl with tattoos. “They’re tasteful,” she added.
"My tattoos are pretty,” she said. “They’re artful and they usually started out to cover some scar, not to make a big statement. Ribbons and bows and butterflies are the things that I have.”
She shared that a past illness required a feeding tube that left “a little indentation in my side,” which she covered with a “little beehive” tattoo.
“I like to make positives out of negatives,” she said.
Celebrities have also spread the lore of Parton’s mysterious ink, like when Roseanne Barr blurted that the singer was “totally tattooed” in an interview with Craig Ferguson in 2011, and Jennifer Saunders saying that Parton bore her chest to her once and displayed “the most beautiful angels and beautiful butterflies and baskets of flowers in pastel-colored tattoos.”
For her part, Parton has stoked the rumors.
“Who knows,” she told People, “I may get some more later. I may just have to get covered with tattoos just so everybody could be right!”
A representative for Dolly Parton did not immediately respond to Vanity Fair’s request for further comment.
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