What was claimed
Cristiano Ronaldo has a tattoo on his back that says “free Palestine”.
Our verdict
There’s no evidence he has these tattoos.
No evidence Cristiano Ronaldo has ‘free Palestine’ tattoo on his back
25 November 2024
There’s no evidence Cristiano Ronaldo has a tattoo of the Palestinian flag on his back, despite social media users sharing an image suggesting he does.
The photo shows the footballer with a tattoo on the back of his neck alongside and image of the Palestinian flag on his left shoulder, and the words “FREE PALESTINE” above it.
However, we’ve not seen any other images showing Ronaldo with this tattoo, nor any credible reports of him having such a tattoo (as presumably there would be had one of the most high profile athletes in the world been photographed with a tattoo of this nature), and an image shared on Ronaldo’s Instagram account in July this year shows no tattoos on his back.
The image being shared online has been circulating since at least 5 November. But photos taken of Ronaldo since then show there is no tattoo on the back of his neck, as appears in the image shared online, suggesting the image has been edited.
We’ve written about other claims relating to flags since the start of the conflict in the Middle East, including an edited photo appearing to show Israeli soldiers holding an ‘ISIS flag’ and false claims that the official Palestinian flag featured a Star of David in 1939.
You can find more of our debunking misinformation concerning the Middle East on our website.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as altered because there’s no evidence Cristiano Ronaldo has these tattoos.