For nearly 30 years, the story was that The Undertaker’s teardrop honored someone he had lost. He says that was not it.
Speaking on Insight with Chris Van Vliet, he explained where the idea came from.
So there’s an old thing like when you see people with teardrop tattoos, they took a life and didn’t shed a tear. So it was just part of my swag.
He was after a reaction more than a meaning.
It was all right, well, this is kind of cool. I knew that people would wonder, like, what’s the, what’s the teardrop for, you know?
So it was kind of for swag and aura, and you know, people asking that same question. It’s like, what’s with the tear? Then the tear got WWE’d, and it turned into like a water drop.
The mark arrived at Survivor Series 1996 at Madison Square Garden, when he came down from the rafters in leather with bat wings and beat Mankind, weeks after being buried alive at In Your House. The wings were a one-off. The teardrop, under his right eye, stayed.
It was never a real tattoo. It was painted on, which is part of why the explanation kept shifting.
The version that stuck came from Paul Bearer, who said for years that the teardrop was in memory of someone close to Undertaker who had died, and would never name the person or the circumstances.
