Prince Harry once decided there was one thing he was set on doing but his friends threatened to physically step in and stop him. While on a holiday in Las Vegas in 2012, the prince was set on getting a tattoo. It is believed that he does not have any inking on his body, yet he has previously admitted that, had he got his way, he would have had a permanent design etched onto his foot.

The prince recounted his near-miss in his 2023 memoir Spare, opening up about his now-notorious trip. He described checking into a suite with his friends and dining like “kings” at a steakhouse on their first evening in the US city known for partying

The following day, the group tucked into breakfast alongside a round of Bloody Marys before heading off to a pool party — and after a day of drinking, Harry said: “I was in rough shape, and filling up with… ideas.

“I need something to commemorate this trip, I decided,” he wrote. “Something to symbolise my sense of freedom, my sense of carpe diem. For instance.. .a tattoo? Yes! Just the thing!”

Harry decided his foot would be the ideal spot for his design, settling on an inking of Botswana: the African nation he has long described as his ‘second home’. “I went to find Billy the Rock to tell him where we were going,” Harry wrote. “He smiled. No way.”

“My mates backed him up. Absolutely not. In fact, they promised to physically stop me. I was not going to get a tattoo, they said, not on their watch, least of all a foot tattoo of Botswana.”

He continued: “They promised to hold me down, knock me out, whatever it took. A tattoo is permanent, it’s forever! Their arguments and threats are one of my last clear memories from that evening. I gave in. The tattoo could wait till the next day.”

Harry was 27 at the time and dating actress Cressida Bonas.

Rather than getting the tattoo, the group carried on their night out at a nightclub before returning to their suite with several women they had met along the way, where a game of strip pool allegedly took place — with the photographs splashed across the press the very next day.

mages of Harry and a young woman surfaced on American website TMZ, which claimed he had been playing “strip billiards” after inviting guests back to his hotel room for a private gathering.

Speaking shortly after the incident, Harry said: “At the end of the day I probably let myself down, I let my family down, I let other people down. But at the end of the day I was in a private area and there should have been a certain amount of privacy that one should expect.”

He added: “It was probably a classic example of me probably being too much Army and not enough prince. It’s a simple case of that.”