Man's still got it.

Sorry. Force of habit whenever I see a Persona 5 story. But yes, The Weeknd has officially debuted a Tae Takemi tattoo, and if you've spent any real time in Atlus's masterpiece, you already know why someone would ink this particular character onto their skin permanently.

Tae Takemi, for the uninitiated, is the goth-punk doctor who runs a clinic in Yongen-Jaya. She's a Confidant link in Persona 5, one of the better ones, and her arc deals with medical ethics, institutional corruption and personal redemption. You don't get her depth from a passing glance. You get it from sitting through hours of dialogue trees, making the right choices, and watching her story unfold one conversation at a time. Persona 5 has always been like that. The characters earn their real estate in your head.

The Weeknd, born Abel Tesfaye, has never been shy about his gaming habits. He's shown up in game streams, talked about his love for various titles, and generally carried the flag for the successful musicians who are also enormous nerds, a contingent the industry rarely acknowledges. When someone at his level of fame puts a video game character on their body, it says something about how far games have penetrated mainstream culture.

I wrote earlier today about what this tattoo represents. A pop star with a Persona tattoo isn't shocking anymore. It's proof of how far this series has traveled from its niche roots. I remember when Persona was a cult JRPG series that maybe a few thousand western players even knew existed. Persona 3 dropped in 2007 and felt like a secret you shared with a small group of friends who had figured out that something special was happening on their PS2.

Then Persona 4 expanded the audience. Then Persona 5 exploded it. Now you've got one of the biggest music artists in the world wearing one of its characters on his arm like it's the most natural thing in the world. I want to say the PS2 era was where Atlus laid the groundwork, but really it goes back further. The Shin Megami Tensei lineage, the whole demon negotiation system, the fusion mechanics, all of that existed on the Super Famicom and earlier. I spent hours grinding through imports with a Japanese dictionary trying to understand what was happening in games most of my friends had never heard of.

Now Tae Takemi is on a pop star's forearm. The series traveled a long road to get there.

Nina Alvarez, my colleague over in our corner of the site, would probably point out that FFXIV has crossover events with various IPs and that Atlus should consider a Persona tie-in for the MMO. I'd argue the series works best as a single-player experience, but that's a debate for another day. Nina and I have been going back and forth on where Final Fantasy's soul lives, single-player versus online, and Persona kind of sits in the same conversation. Some stories need one player holding the controller.

Persona 6 is presumably somewhere in development, though Atlus plays its cards close. If it lands with even half the cultural impact of Persona 5, expect more tattoos, more mainstream attention, and more proof that the JRPG is alive and well in 2026.