Nadal's greatest fan shows off third Rafa tattoo

Friday will mark Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer's 40th career face-off, and their first at Wimbledon since their legendary 2008 final.

It's no surprise, then, that Nadal superfan Sriram Tripuraribhotla already has his plans for Championship Sunday sorted.

For the uninitiated, Tripuraribhotla, an IT project manager from Toronto, is known for his numerous Nadal tattoos and his related encounters with the King of Clay himself.

Here's a rundown of them:

1

His first, the one that initially earned him Nadal's attention, was the classic Nike bull logo. It actually got him onto Nadal's own Instagram, at a Rogers Cup practice session in 2018.

"[Nadal] picks up his cell phone from his bag and gives it to Francisco Roig, his coach, and asks him in Spanish to take a picture of him with me," Tripuraribhotla told Baseline. “That was, like, the best moment of my life. I was just flying, floating in air."

2

But things got even crazier later in that tournament, when Tripuraribhotla had Nadal sign his arm, and subsequently had it traced over into a second tattoo:

3

Most recently, though, he commemorated Nadal's record-extending 12th Roland Garros title with a third Rafa tattoo, which reads "Keep Calm And Vamos RAFA."

"I wanted to get Rafa's face," Tripuraribhotla said. "My tattoo artist said, 'I know you love Rafa, but that'll be too much. People may start to think there's something wrong with you.'"

Additionally, in the Rafa-adjacent category, Tripuraribhotla has a tiger on his bicep.

"A white tiger because [Nadal] is laser-focused and about to hunt for each point," he says. "When he is focused, he is in beast mode ... If he wants it, he gets it. He goes for it."

Nadal will have to go for it in the Wimbledon semis, where he'll look to defeat Federer off of clay for the first time since 2014, and on grass for the first time since he won the whole thing in 2008.