pre-order 2026 final programmes - 10% OFF!
Use code: KO50 at checkout
START SHOPPING
This is an excerpt from Georgia Stanway’s interview in issue 26 of Champions Journal. To read it in full, buy the issue here, or if you’re a paid subscriber you can read the full story on the CJ website.
INTERVIEW Lizzie Coan
For most footballers, if you’re after their complete CV, you’d most likely head to their Wikipedia page. For Georgia Stanway, you can just roll back a sleeve and look at her skin.
From a set of Olympic rings representing her time in the competition, to a recent II in Roman numerals celebrating her two EURO wins, the 27-year-old has commemorated her extensive roll-call of career highlights with plenty of permanently inked reminders.
Yet Stanway’s impressive résumé – which includes three FA Cups, three Bundesliga titles and one DFB-Pokal win, alongside those EURO trophies – makes up just a part of her patchwork of over 100 delicate, fine-line tattoos.
Not content with her success on the pitch or her own extensive ink collection, Stanway has been quietly studying the craft of tattooing in her spare time, picking up the gun herself in recent years to tattoo friends and family. During her four years at Bayern, she’s become fully embedded in the Munich tattoo scene, and when she leaves the club at the end of this season, she’ll be on the lookout for new studios, and willing customers, wherever she finds herself playing next. Here, she tells us how she got started on her budding new career and the escape it provides from the day-to-day demands of football.
Tattoos have always been a part of my family: my dad’s got a lot, my brothers have got a lot, and it was just normal for us. We knew a guy called Tattoo Stu and he’d come round to the house. I was always interested in watching how he was doing it and, as I got older, I knew that I wanted tattoos. My first one was the coordinates of where I lived, because I’d moved home. At first, it started off sentimental, and then you run out of things that are sentimental and it just became a little bit random.
Yeah, there are a few that have got hidden meanings. Like, a family member has drawn something that’s maybe a little bit imperfect, but that’s what I like about it. Then you’ve got the things that are sentimental, like the time that the final whistle went when we won the EUROs; “home” because football came home; “31” because that’s my Bayern number; “+44”, the dial code for home. So, there are a few random things with hidden meanings and then a few that are just a little bit deeper.
