Lady Gaga and her father honoured his late sister Joanne by getting matching tattoos of her name.
The Poker Face singer named her most recent album Joanne after her late aunt, who died of lupus aged 19 before Gaga was born. Gaga recently said Joanne's short life was a source of inspiration for her and the album's title track was the "heart and soul of the record".
The 30-year-old already bears her aunt's moniker as a middle name, has the date of her death tattooed on her upper arm, and her father Joe named his Italian restaurant in New York Joanne Trattoria after her, but they have now gone one step further in honouring their relative by both getting Joanne's signature permanently etched on themselves.
Gaga posted a picture on Instagram showing her posing for the camera in jeans, a cropped white T-shirt and the pink hat used on her new album cover. Her new tattoo on her on the inside of her left forearm can clearly be seen with her other body art.
“Got Joanne tattooed on my arm in her actual signature,” Gaga wrote in the caption. “My dad got one too. With an angel on his shoulder.”
The singer recently told Britain's The Sun newspaper that she has felt a connection to her aunt even though she never got to meet her, and wrote the song Joanne in an attempt to heal her father.
“I never was able to truly understand why my father was so sad," she said. “There was something inside of him like a loss or a trauma that I just couldn’t perceive of... So I wanted to make a song that would be really healing to my dad.”
She recalls the first time she played him the track, he told her, "‘How did you know that? How did you know that’s what I wanted to say?’”
To promote the album, the star has also joined talk show host James Corden for a round of his Carpool Karaoke sketch. The segment, which features them singing classic hits such as Bad Romance and discussing her upcoming performance at the Super Bowl, airs in the U.S. on Tuesday (25Oct16).
