By Ayesha Khan 
Bengaluru, March 27: Ink Before the First Ball The video did not arrive with a press release. There was no media briefing, no carefully worded statement from a PR team. Just a clip, posted to Instagram by a Mumbai tattoo studio, showing Virat Kohli sitting quietly under a needle for hours while the rest of the cricket world was busy picking fantasy teams and debating RCB’s title defence. By the time most people woke up on Thursday, it had already crossed millions of views.
That is very much the Kohli way. Loud in everything, and yet somehow always managing to say the most personal things without actually saying anything at all.
The tattoo is on his left arm. It is a full sleeve, or close enough to one and that qualifier matters, because the studio that made it, Aliens Tattoo India, has been deliberate about pointing out that it is not finished. Not because the sessions ran out of time. Because that is exactly how it was designed.
The Arm Had a History Before This
Anyone expecting a clean canvas would have been wrong. Kohli’s left arm already carried years of ink going into this project an incomplete armband inspired by Lord Shiva, older designs that had faded or lost their sharpness, fragments from different chapters of his life sitting next to each other without quite adding up to a single story.
The brief given to the artists at Aliens Tattoo was not to erase any of that. It was to make sense of it. As the studio put it in their own statement, some parts needed covering, some needed restoring, and a great deal more needed adding but all of it with a purpose, not just to fill space.
They started with the Shiva armband. It was already there, but time had dulled it. The artists went back into it, rebuilt its depth, brought back the contrast. From there, the design moves into a dotwork mandala that runs down the arm as its central structure intricate, precise, the kind of thing that takes a very steady hand and a very patient subject. Both, it seems, were available.
What makes this project genuinely unusual in the world of celebrity tattooing is that it was not the work of a single artist. Aliens Tattoo founder Sunny Bhanushali led the design, with Allan Gois and Devendra Palav each contributing according to their own area of expertise. Three people, one arm, 24 hours of work spread across multiple sessions. The studio described it plainly this piece demanded skills that no one artist could have handled alone.
What the Symbols Actually Mean
Here is the honest answer: only Kohli knows.
The studio has shared the visual elements. At the upper portion of the sleeve, near the tricep and the shoulder, there is a peony and a lotus, each executed in a different style. On the front of the arm, semi-realism. Around it, dotwork. On the back, a geometric flower rendered in stippling. The styles shift, but the composition holds together. Nothing feels like it wandered in from a different project.
The lotus has drawn the most attention, and not without reason. The studio described it as a flower that rises from muddy water and blooms with purity regardless of where it grows. For a man who has spent the better part of two decades living his entire career every run, every duck, every comeback inside a public microscope, the metaphor is not subtle. It is also not wrong.
Still, the studio was careful. Each element in the mandala carries meaning, they said, and then stopped right there. The story behind it belongs to Virat. They were not going to tell it for him.
That restraint is either deeply respectful or very good marketing. Probably both. Either way, it works.
Unfinished, and Meant to Stay That Way
The sleeve is not complete. This is being said openly, without apology. The artists see several more sessions ahead before the arm reaches what they are calling its final form and even that framing feels deliberately loose, because the broader idea is that the tattoo will keep evolving as Kohli’s life does. New milestones, new ink. Not a fixed record of one moment, but a document that keeps getting written.
It sounds like something a studio would say to justify ongoing business. But in Kohli’s case, given who he is and what he is still chasing, it does not feel hollow. The man is 37 years old, entering a season where he could become the first player in IPL history to reach 9,000 runs. He is not winding down. The sleeve makes a kind of sense.
What He Is Walking Into Tomorrow
RCB open their title defence on March 28 against Sunrisers Hyderabad at the Chinnaswamy Stadium. First match of the entire tournament. Defending champions, home ground, sold-out stands. If Kohli had wanted to manufacture a moment, he could not have scripted better conditions.
He is not pretending the season will be easy. At a recent practice session, he told his teammates in plain terms other teams have had a full year to study RCB, to prepare specifically for what won them the trophy, and they will come hard. His words, as reported by ANI, carried an edge that is entirely familiar to anyone who has watched him bat under pressure: “We do not waste these days. We stay ahead. So switch on now. Let us not waste even a minute of any session that we are a part of. We must give our 120 per cent for these two and a half months.”
It is the same sermon he has delivered in various forms throughout his career. The difference now is that he is delivering it as a champion, which changes the weight of it.
The Numbers Underneath Everything
Sentiment aside, there is a statistical dimension to this season that gives it an extra layer of context.
Kohli stands at 8,661 IPL runs across 267 matches. The 9,000-run mark has never been touched by anyone in the history of the competition. He is the closest. At his average scoring rate across recent seasons 657 runs at 54.75 last year alone the milestone is not just possible, it is expected.
Beyond the IPL, in T20 internationals, he sits at 13,543 runs and is chasing a place in the 14,000-run club in global T20 cricket, a group that currently has four members: Chris Gayle, Kieron Pollard, Alex Hales, and David Warner. A strong season, combined with international appearances, and Kohli gets there.
These numbers do not make the tattoo more meaningful. But they do put the man in context someone who, at an age when most players are managing their workloads and thinking about exit strategies, is still chasing records that did not exist when he started.
One Last Thing
There is always a temptation, when writing about Kohli, to over-explain the symbolism. To find in every gesture a statement about identity, legacy, the burden of greatness. Sometimes a tattoo is just a tattoo.
But this one does not feel like that. The 24 hours of work, the three artists, the deliberate choice to leave it unfinished, the timing two days before the biggest night of RCB’s season none of that happened by accident. Kohli does not do things by accident.
The Chinnaswamy will be full on Friday evening. The crowd will be loud, the expectations enormous, the pressure real. And somewhere in that noise, a man with an unfinished sleeve on his left arm will walk to the crease and do what he has always done.
The arm keeps its story. The bat tells its own.
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- Ayesha Khan
- Ayesha Khan
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- Ayesha Khan
