Why does Aryna Sabalenka have a tattoo of a tiger?
Aryna Sabalenka has caught the eye this year with her incredible power game but she is also notable for her tattoo.
Sabalenka has a prominent tiger tattoo on her left forearm which is a reference to the year she was born, 1998, which is the year of the Tiger in the cyclical Chinese zodiac.
The tattoo both reflects her birth year she also draws on it as a source of inspiration as a representation of her indomitable spirit.
She got her first bit of ink when she was just 18 which her mother wasn’t thrilled about.
“I think I was 18 years old and my parents didn’t know, and when they saw it the first time my dad was laughing, I don’t know why but my mom didn’t talk to me for one week, and then she said like ‘I hope it’s the first in the last one and I said ‘look mama the first one and the last one and then I turned out I said ‘hopefully’.”
“It’s special as sometimes I need to remind myself that I am the tigress and I need to fight till the end. I just put it on my arm to make sure I can see it every time and be on fire,” said Sabalenka.
“Sometimes in the court, it reminds me that you need to fight for each point.”
Some sources have claimed that Aryna Sabalenka has a second tiger tattoo on her thigh, but the images provided can be shown to actually be of Elina Svitolina’s tiger tattoo on her left thigh.
Sabalenka is known to be in a relationship with former NHL star Konstantin Koltsov who is from Minsk, the home of the tennis star.
The world No 2 is kitted out by Nike and has her rackets supplied by Wilson with both retaining commercial deals with the star for an undisclosed fee.
Sabalenka made her presence known on the WTA tour with her maiden WTA 1000 win at the Wuhan Open in 2018, Sabalenka defended that title in 2019 and will technically be the defending champion when the event returns to the tour later in 2023.
She reportedly started playing tennis at the age of six and her early successes on the WTA Tour came as a teenager.
Sabalenka won her first Grand Slam at the age of 24 and is expected to have a long and successful career.
She had credited work with a biokineticist for getting her game back on track after she started to struggle with a double fault problem.
“I worked so hard. Even when my serve was a disaster, I worked a lot on my serve. I kept trying, kept believing, kept changing. Then I worked on my biomechanics,” Sabalenka told reporters in January 2023.
“I thought it was (my) mentality, but it wasn’t. We changed a lot of things on how we work on my serve. We tried so many different things.
“In the end of the season when I started working with the biomechanic guy, he helped me a lot.
“We watched a lot of videos. He was just showing what’s not really right about my serve,” Sabalenka added.
“I’m super happy that this thing with my serve happened to me. Before I wouldn’t be really open for that. I would be like, ‘You know what, my serve is fine, I don’t want to change anything’.
“Actually, even when my serve was working, it wasn’t really right… In that moment, I was open for whatever. I was just like, ‘Please, someone help me to fix this…’ I learnt a lot of new stuff about my serve,” Sabalenka concluded.
Sabalenka won her second Grand Slam at the 2024 Australian Open defending her title won the previous term.
