The quote is pulled from a speech former Senator Alan Simpson gave at President George H. W. Bush’s funeral, in which he stressed Bush’s inherent goodness. He “never hated” anyone, Simpson said, because “hatred corrodes the container it is carried in.” It’s unclear whose hatred Lauer is calling out; is it a pointed message to the people who hate him for being a sexual predator, or a message to himself? But the Simpson quote is a rich choice, given the senator’s past comments on sexual harassment.

Back in 1991, former Wyoming Senator Simpson was part of the Senate Judiciary Committee that heard Anita Hill’s testimony on Clarence Thomas sexually harassing her. Simpson specifically grilled Hill on the allegations of Thomas’s inappropriate behavior. “It seems to me you didn’t really intend to kill him, but you might have,” he said during the hearings, referring to her accusation as a “torpedo” that could sink Thomas. Simpson was confused as to why Hill did not immediately tell the FBI about the harassment. In 2014 he said that Hill’s testimony made him “pissed to the core. “‘He wanted to talk about Long Dong Silver and pubic hair and coke cans,’” Simpson said, paraphrasing what Hill testified. “‘Is that it?’”

Lauer clearly wanted the world to see his wretched tattoo. Lately he’s been crawling out from whatever cave he’s been living in in the Hamptons, penning an op-ed the other day rebuking Ronan Farrow’s investigation into his sexual misconduct. But what will keep me up at night is the cursive script the tattoo is written in. I briefly wondered if maybe the tattoo was written in Lauer’s own handwriting, but after looking at a sample of it used in a Today Show segment, the “n”s are similar but the “d”s are completely different.

Tattoo artists everywhere, if you did this ink, please tell us who you are. I need to know everything about the art direction that made this horrible tattoo possible.