TV host Carson Daly’s tattoos honor family. A crab claw hides actress Jennifer Love Hewitt

Carson Daly has spent decades turning his body into a family archive, and the only tattoo he tells as a joke is the one that used to carry a girlfriend’s name. On the Today show, the TV host told co-host Jenna Bush Hager how an ex’s name on his ankle became, in his words, “a crab claw coming out of a pocket knife.” He did not say who the ex was. Entertainment Weekly, People and The US Sun filled in the blank within hours: Jennifer Love Hewitt, the I Know What You Did Last Summer actress he dated at the height of his MTV fame.

The anecdote travels as celebrity trivia, but it settles an argument that anyone with ink, or anyone thinking about it, eventually has: whose name earns permanent space on a body. Read off Daly’s own skin, the answer is that family names do and partner names don’t, and that a cover-up which means nothing is a better ending for a regretted name than any attempt to erase it. The crab claw is not a lapse of taste. It is the most honest tattoo he has.

That matters beyond one morning-show host. According to the Pew Research Center, about a third of American adults have at least one tattoo, and about a quarter of those say they regret at least one. A partner’s name is the classic case, the tattoo artists warn about and clients book anyway. Daly’s story is a cheap lesson for anyone weighing that choice, delivered by a man who paid for it twice: once in ink, and once in a career of retelling it.

Recommended ReadingMouthwashing on Xbox Game Pass: 800,000 sales first, subscription second

What Carson Daly told Today about the crab claw tattoo

The version Daly gave this week runs like this. He had one ex-girlfriend’s name on his ankle. “And then I dated another girl who said, ‘That’s got to go,’” he told Bush Hager, according to People. He was in a tattoo chair in Hell’s Kitchen, about six hours into a new piece, when he remembered the old one and told his artist, “You gotta just do something with the ex.” The artist replied that there was something he had always wanted to try. “An hour later I looked at it and now I have, it’s a crab claw coming out of a pocket knife.”

Bush Hager offered the obvious diagnosis: nobody inks a partner’s name expecting to break up. Daly gave a better one. “No, I was drunk in the Jersey Shore,” he said. “I was in Seaside Heights. I remember like it was yesterday.” His advice, as Entertainment Weekly reported it, was plain: “Don’t put a tattoo on your body that you might want to remove.”

Daly kept the ex anonymous on air, and People and The US Sun both said so before identifying her from his earlier remarks. That identification is not a guess. People recalls that when Hewitt was a guest on his late-night show, Last Call with Carson Daly, he showed her the cover-up that had replaced her name. He said their romance “ended a little weird.” Hewitt agreed, then added, “It did, but that doesn’t matter.”

Every other Carson Daly tattoo is a family tribute

The crab claw stands out because of what surrounds it. Daly has explained most of his tattoos over the years, and in a roundup of those interviews Good Housekeeping quoted his own summary from a Today segment: “I’m a family-first kind of guy, so everything on my body is really about my family.” His first tattoo copies the hood ornament of a Corvette left to him by his father, James Daly, a Corvette dealer who died when Carson was five. A doctored whisky label reading “Curly Sark” honors his stepfather. A Green Beret emblem honors his grandfather.

His children are on his arms too, according to the interviews Good Housekeeping collected from Golf Channel’s Feherty: a lion with a rose for his daughter London Rose and his grandmother Rose, a warrior woman for his daughter Etta, a playing-card design for his son. NBC Insider reported that he later added his late mother’s handwriting to his wrist, copying the sign-off she wrote on his school lunch napkins, “ILYTWWF,” short for “I Love You The Whole World Full.” “I’ve been waiting forever to get this tattoo,” he wrote when he showed it.

Set the crab claw against that collection and the pattern is hard to miss. The tattoos Daly treats as sacred are about people who cannot stop being his family: the dead, the children, the bloodline. The one that failed was about a relationship that could end, and did. Pew found that honoring or remembering someone is the most common reason Americans give for their tattoos, cited by 69% of tattooed adults as a major or minor reason. Daly is that statistic with sleeves.

The retellings of the Jennifer Love Hewitt cover-up don’t match

The story has also shifted with each telling, which is the clearest sign that it is now a bit rather than a memory. In the account Good Housekeeping assembled from his Feherty and Last Call interviews, the girlfriend who demanded the cover-up has a name: Tara Reid. Daly said on Last Call that there was “no way on God’s green Earth I was going to write the word ‘Tara’ anywhere on my body.” In that version he asked his artist, nicknamed Braino, “Can you do something really fast on my ankle or my girl’s going to kill me,” and the job took 30 minutes. “I went, ‘Awesome. It’ll work.’”

In the Today version, Reid goes unnamed, the rush job becomes an artist’s long-held idea, and 30 minutes becomes an hour. None of this makes the story false. The core holds across every telling: a girlfriend’s name, a later girlfriend’s ultimatum, an artist given free rein, a crab claw and a pocket knife. The drift sits exactly where a raconteur sands a story for a new audience. Even the readers The US Sun quoted were doing the arithmetic; one said they first thought of Tara, then decided a name of four letters would never need a claw and a knife to hide it.

The case for inking a partner’s name, and why it fails

The strongest objection to this verdict deserves a full hearing. A partner’s name is supposed to be a risk; that is the point of it. Permanence is the gesture, and a tattoo that hedges against heartbreak is just decoration. The numbers also cut against the scare story: most tattooed Americans, Pew found, have never regretted one. And Daly’s own advice proves too much. His arms carry the names Jaden Patricia and London Rose, and any name can one day become awkward.

There is a second objection, about the coverage itself. Daly chose not to name his ex, and three outlets named her anyway, more than a quarter of a century after the relationship ended, about an actress who has long been married with a family of her own. On that reading, the Hewitt headline is the part of this story nobody needed.

Both points are fair, and neither holds. The commitment argument treats a tattoo as a vow, but a vow can be renewed or released and a tattoo cannot, so the risk is lopsided: the relationship is allowed to change and the skin is not. Family names are different not because family is sentimental but because the bond cannot be revoked. A daughter stays a daughter. A father who died stays your father. Hewitt appears to draw the same line: Good Morning America reported that she added three butterflies for her three children.

As for the naming, Daly put Hewitt in the frame himself, on his own show, with her as his guest. His co-hosts treat the subject as fair game too. People reported that when Daly discussed the I Know What You Did Last Summer franchise on Today, Savannah Guthrie told him, “We know what you did that summer.” Daly laughed it off: “Yeah, I’ve heard the jokes. I’m aware.” The joke is old, public and shared by everyone in it.

What Carson Daly has confirmed, and what rests on his memory

On the record: Daly told Today this week that a former girlfriend’s name on his ankle was covered with a crab claw coming out of a pocket knife after a later girlfriend objected. He has previously identified the ex as Jennifer Love Hewitt, and he showed her the cover-up on Last Call with Carson Daly in 2005, according to People. They dated for about a year in the late 1990s. Daly, 53, has been married to Siri Pinter since 2015, and they have four children; Hewitt married actor Brian Hallisay in 2013, and they have three. Pew’s figures come from a survey of 8,480 adults in July 2023. Good Morning America reported Hewitt’s butterflies in April 2023, and NBC Insider reported the handwriting tattoo in December 2023; Pattie Daly Caruso, his mother, died in 2017.

Still open: the details of the session. Tara Reid is named as the girlfriend who demanded the cover-up only in the older accounts, the time in the chair has grown from 30 minutes to an hour, and the artist’s motive has moved from speed to ambition. Those are Daly’s recollections and nobody else’s. The reading offered here, that the crab claw is the right ending for a partner’s name, is interpretation. The facts beneath it are not in dispute.

Daly’s advice is never to get a tattoo you might want to remove. The better rule is already written on his arms: ink the people who can’t leave, and if you ink one who can, let the cover-up mean nothing. A crab claw coming out of a pocket knife will never need covering again.

Tags: Today, Carson Daly, celebrity tattoos, Jenna Bush Hager, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Tara Reid

More Like This

iOS 27 public beta is out — and Siri AI comes with an asterisk

Google built the AI cloud that drove up the price of its own phone

The Mosquito Bowl reviews: director Peter Berg made a memorial, not an antiwar film

San Fermín draws a million people to watch something 77% of Spain wants to stop

The Return to Real: Why a Hyper-Connected Generation Craves Authenticity

Real Madrid midfielder Thiago Pitarch: Mourinho blocked his loan and owes him minutes