Why did Biggie Smalls and Diddy have identical tattoos?
The Notorious BIG and his label boss Diddy are bound together, for better and for worse, in music history. But their connection was apparently expressed in more ways than one. They are even believed to have gotten tattoos of the same thing on their arms.
During an interview in 1997 with the LA Times, conducted only shortly before his shooting, Biggie was happy to highlight a fresh tattoo that he’d gotten only a week beforehand. It was placed on the inside of his right forearm.
The tattoo was of a biblical quote, Psalm 27, that read, “The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear? The Lord is the truth of my life, of whom shall I be afraid? When the wicked, even my enemies and foes, came upon me to bite my flesh, they stumbled and fell.”
Biggie was proud of the tattoo, and he understood it as representing a more positive direction in life that he sought to take at the time. He’d experienced some heavy years of excess, but, now, he wanted a change.
“When you start making a whole lot of money and you start living too fast, it’s up to you to slow yourself down,” he told the paper. “You can’t be getting drunk, smoking two or three ounces of weed a day, and [having sex] with all these different females. Something’s bound to happen.”
Biggie understood that he’d been living in unsustainable, dangerous ways, but, following a car accident that left him quite badly injured, he’d decided that enough was enough. “I was in the hospital for two and three months and it gave me a lot of time to think about my life and where it was headed,” he reflected. “I said to myself, ‘BIG, you’re moving too fast. When you get back on your feet, it’s time for this… to change.’”
This change was represented by the tattoo, which served to remind Biggie of his faith. “This is to reassure myself that whatever goes wrong, no matter how bad things seem, God is right there for you, you know?” he said of the ink on his arm. “As long as you believe in him and his strength—all these jealous people, all these sharks… He’ll stop all of that.”
Biggie felt that he was now on the “righteous road” that would see him thrive, which, sadly, proved not to be the case. He would be dead by the time the LA Times profile was published.
The tattoo had clearly meant a lot to Biggie, who, evidently, viewed it as symbolic of a more positive turn in his life. But after he died, it seems that Diddy took on the tattoo for himself. According to Capital XTRA’s website, the Bad Boy Records boss later got the same quote tattooed in the same place on his arm.