ORIGINS

According to Animal's autobiography, The Road Warriors: Danger, Death and the Rush of Wrestling, it was promoter "Cowboy" Bill Watts who first suggested face paint to Hawk & Animal:

"So we bought tubes of red, yellow, silver, black, and blue makeup and started experimenting with designs. I even went back and watched The Road Warrior to get some inspiration, which worked like a charm.
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One thing was for sure: with the paint on, I didn't feel like Joe anymore; I was Animal. One look at Mike, and I knew he'd also checked out long ago in favor of Hawk.

With only a couple of brush strokes to the face, we could step out of our normal lives and into the boots of Road Warrior Animal and Road Warrior Hawk. As a kid, I'd always wondered what it would be like to have a secret identity and superpowers like the Hulk and Superman. Now I knew.

I'll never forget the looks on the other guys' faces the first time we revealed our new look backstage before TV tapings. We were in Atlanta in the offices of the little studio where we taped World Championship Wrestling. The studio had no real locker room to speak of, so the guys just changed in various partitions in the office. When Hawk and I emerged from our cubicle with the new haircuts and the paint, the banter of all the wrestlers instantly died into complete silence."

DESIGNS

As Animal recounted in his autobiography, their move to Verne Gagne's American Wrestling Association (AWA) also meant performing in front of their home fans in Minnesota for the first time, which prompted them to take their look to another level:

“Since day one, Hawk and I were always modifying our paint jobs. The look I was using with the devil horn lines was cool, but it needed something more.”

• On Hawk's most famous design, "The Joker":

“Hawk started experimenting with two different looks. The first was what he called the joker, which was a giant upside-down red triangle under his left eye and then a giant spiral of black completely covering his right eye. Sometimes he played around with the colors and the spiral part would be blue or something, but the joker look became the design Hawk would be most recognized for over the years.”

• On Hawk's other go-to design, the flying hawk / wing span:

“His second go-to paint job was a full-faced concept that looked kind of like a flying hawk right on his face. Between his eyes on the bridge of his nose, Hawk drew a point and then flared two big lines diagonally up toward each side of his forehead. Then he took those lines and went almost straight down each cheek, stopping short of the jawline. When Hawk connected those lines back up to the center of his nose and dropped down for a final point down to the tip of his nose, it looked like a cool wing span. Then he filled it in with solid colors, sometimes all black.”

• Animal's devil horn / butterfly design:

"I started connecting the devil horn lines on each side of my forehead to the lines on the far sides of my face and under my eyes. With everything drawn together, it created an outline I started filling in with black, red, green, and yellow. The result was a solid, evil-looking mask, a perfect translation of how I felt in character: badass."

• Animal's iconic "Spider" design:

In the summer of 1987, when Animal & Hawk added their spiked shoulderpads to their entrance gear, Animal also made a change to his face paint that would become a permanent part of his look:

"Inspired by the new addition to our gimmick, I also started to experiment with a new Road Warrior Animal paint job. Sketching out some ideas, I began to draw a web with a spider in the middle. That was it! I drew the webbing onto my face in the same general shape as my standard devil horn look, only I didn't fill it in with solid colors. I simply connected a series of lines into a point between my eyes and then painted a little black spider hanging right in the center.

It gave me chills looking at it. I thought, don't get caught in the web. Hell, yeah. Being stuck in Animal's web meant certain doom for all unfortunate prey."

THE MASK

Animal's hockey mask, worn during 1988 eye injury (original)

As recounted in his autobiography, The Road Warriors: Danger, Death and the Rush of Wrestling, Animal recalled how the mask came to be:

​"After the surgery, I was out of commission for almost the entire month of February. In my absence, Hawk and Paul wrestled against the POP all around the country. By the end of the month, I had healed enough to make run-ins during matches where Paul Jones or Ivan Koloff decided to get involved. To protect my face and ensure I didn't suffer any accidental shots, I wore a custom white hockey mask, which I painted in a cool black variation of my spider and webbing face paint.

I thought my mask was the coolest thing. When I came running down wearing it for the first time, I felt like Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th, ready to hack my victims to pieces. I got plenty of time to live out my Jason fantasy, too, as I wound up wearing the mask for the next six weeks or so. As a matter of fact, I wore it for our match at Crockett's latest entry into the professional wrestling wars with the WWF, the Clash of the Champions."

While the mask would be shed in early April 1988, it would remain an iconic symbol of the toughness and determination of The Road Warriors.

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BROTHERS IN PAINT

With the immense popularity of The Road Warriors and their distinctive face paint designs, it was inevitable that competitors teaming with Animal & Hawk would adopt the paint themselves from time to time.

FAN TATTOOS

While it’s not all that unusual for wrestling fans to have tattoos, often of their favorite performers, most focus on a singles competitor.

​If you find a wrestling fan with a tattoo representing a tag team, odds are that it will feature Hawk & Animal.