Marlon ‘Chito’ Vera Shows Off Back Tattoo by Mister Cartoon

Marlon “Chito” Vera is an up-and-coming name in the UFC, coming at #4 in the rankings of the Bantamweight division. He’ll be taking on Cory Sandhagen at UFC Vegas 69 with a chance to rise even higher with a potential title shot in the not too distant future. But when it comes to Inked’s rankings of the best tattooed fighters in all of MMA, Vera just put in a strong claim for the title spot.

Vera recently took to Instagram to show off his just finished back piece by the one-and-only Mister Cartoon. If you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple decades, Mister Cartoon is one of the most sought-after black-and-grey artists on the planet. His Chicano style work isn’t following a trend, it is the original upon which the trend was set.

We’d gotten a look at the back tattoo towards the end of last year, but during a recent appearance on The MMA Hour with Ariel Helwani, Vera went over some of the details of the intricate piece.

“It’s a big rooster in the middle that represents the fighting and me growing up going to the rooster fights with my grandfather when I was a little kid, and my father,” Vera told Helwani. “The crazy environment I got to live in. There’s a sign of the town I was born, which is Chone, it says, ‘Welcome to Chone.’ There’s orange trees because it’s called the ‘City of Orange’ where I was born because there’s orange trees everywhere, and there’s a road that goes around my lower back and then you start seeing buildings, a clown mask—which is Cartoon’s specialty—and a woman behind the clown. The clown part is me doing all the crazy shit to be where I am. The woman in the back is the lady that pushed me to be the man I am today. It’s little things like that.”

Now that his back is finished, Vera’s got some other spots to fill. He mentioned that he’ll likely be turning to a legend in American Traditional, Bert Krak, for that task. Krak recently tattooed the back of Vera’s head.

As the editor here at Inked I want to offer a heartfelt thank you to Vera. I’ve spent more hours writing about famous people and their terrible tattoos than I’d ever care to tabulate for fear of losing my sanity, so it is a great relief to have the opportunity to cover somebody who’s doing things the right way. Kudos, Chito!