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Joe Manganiello revealed his massive three-foot dragon tattoo, which goes down the right side of his body.
The “True Blood” alum, 49, showed off his ink on Instagram Monday, sharing that he got the tattoo to cover his surgical scars. Manganiello underwent emergency intestinal surgery back in 2016 and battled a near-fatal autoimmune disease for seven years, which he writes about in his new memoir, “Bloodlines.”
He showed the progression of the tattoo in pics, going from a black outline to eventually getting it colored in with red and orange.
“In chapter four [of “Bloodlines”], I related my struggle with the illness to my body sending out knights to fight a (western) dragon that didn’t exist,” he captioned the post. “The soldiers would then punch holes throughout my body when they couldn’t find an enemy.”
“The idea to cover my surgery scars with my first tattoo, a three-foot dragon down my right side, was my effort to take back what little agency I felt that I had, and to signal to my body to stop attacking the dragon… because the (eastern) dragon was me…,” he continued.
Last week, the actor posted shocking pics of himself in the hospital after they took out his large intestine, showing his drastic weight loss.
“In the days following the amputation of my large intestine, my weight began to plummet,” he wrote on Instagram. “I would ultimately lose a total of 60 lbs during the two weeks following the surgery.”
He showed a second graphic close-up of his “abdomen after the reconnection/take down surgery or anastomosis, in which my ostomy bag was removed and what was left of my digestive tract was reconnected.”
The “Magic Mike” star’s memoir also delves into how his illness negatively affected his marriage to his now ex-wife, Sofía Vergara.
After he wrote in the book that she “ridiculed” him for his 5-pound dog named Bubbles — whom Manganiello adopted in 2019 when he was considering suicide — and refused to give him a hug even when he begged, she hit back by posting about “narcissistic men” on Instagram.
But Manganiello insisted his book is about the “suffering” he went through with his illness, and not about his failed marriage to Vergara, in an interview with “CBS Mornings” last week.
“The trauma and the pain affected everyone in my life, including me in ways that you can’t predict,” he shared.
“This book is about the journey I went through,” he continued, noting that he tried to “paint everyone with an amount of grace.”
Manganiello is now engaged to Caitlin O’Connor after two years of dating, but he admitted he’d probably still be married to Vergara if it wasn’t for his illness during his appearance on SiriusXM’s “Radio Andy” last Wednesday.
He said that thinks about it often when he sees photos of him with the “Modern Family” alum from when they first started dating.
“It’s heartbreaking when you look at these two people with life ahead of them, but for us, we didn’t know what was ahead,” he said. “I felt guilty for a long time.”