Presley Gerber appears to have had his infamous “misunderstood” face tattoo removed just over a year after debuting it publicly. The 22-year-old son of Cindy Crawford and Rande Gerber was spotted out in Malibu, California, Monday seemingly without the ink that sat on his upper right cheek and appeared to have been in the process of removing it for several months based on its fading in photos he shared to Instagram.
While Gerber still has a tattoo on his neck, only a faint scar can be seen on his face where the word “misunderstood” was once inked by celebrity tattoo artist JobBoy. April was the last time the model showed off the tattoo fully on Instagram, and posts since then have shown it appearing lighter and less prominent.
Gerber first debuted the tattoo in February 2020, telling critics at the time, “You don’t know how I feel. You’re not in my head. I don’t feel very understood, I guess.” He continued in the same video, “If anyone has s— to say to me about this, or anything else, or my family, or how I grew up … I will give you my address — I promise — and you can come to say it to my face.”
He then defended his decision in March of that year, writing on social media, “Most and a lot of people can get a facelift, change genders, lip injections, etc. and it’s offensive to say anything in today’s day in age, but I get a little face tattoo, and now people love to hate me.. Hmmm?”
Gerber still has his fair share of body art, including a barbed wire tattoo on his hand, a gun on his hip, and a matching tattoo with sister Kaia Gerber he got last January after previously getting “Kaia XXIII” inked on his arm in 2018. Gerber and his girlfriend, Sydney Brooke, spent most of the COVID-19 pandemic working at his father’s Malibu restaurant Cafe Habana, which a source told PEOPLE last May was positively affecting the young man. “He and Sydney work together. They try to work the same shift,” the insider shared. “Presley still lives at his parents’ guest house, and Sydney spends time there as well. Presley has slowed down the partying.”