Lady Gaga honors David Bowie with tattoo tribute

Lady Gaga has honored the memory of her idol David Bowie by having his image tattooed onto her body.

The Born This Way superstar will perform a special tribute to Bowie at Monday's (15Feb16) Grammy Awards, where the music legend will be posthumously celebrated with the Lifetime Achievement prize.

Now Gaga has revealed she will have a permanent personal reminder of Bowie with her as she steps onstage at the Los Angeles ceremony after taking to social media app Snapchat to share an image of her during Saturday night's (13Feb16) tattoo session.

The skin art, inked onto Gaga's rib cage by West Hollywood's Mark Mahoney, features Bowie's face from the cover of his 1973 Aladdin Sane album.

"this was the image that changed my life," she captioned the photo.

"Hail Mary full of grace Saint Bowie," she added alongside another picture of the tattoo.

Bowie passed away on 10 January (16) after a battle with cancer, and Gaga recently admitted she was still coming to terms with his death.

"It's hard to talk about," she told news show Extra. "I would never be here without him - I would've thought I was too weird - and I never gave up because I thought he was the coolest ever."

The New York-born singer had previously credited Bowie with inspiring her to pursue her pop dreams.

"When I fell in love with David Bowie, when I was living on the Lower East Side, I always felt that his glamour was something he was using to express a message to people that was very healing for their souls," she told The Hollywood Reporter. "He is a true, true artist and I don't know if I ever went 'Oh, I'm going to be that way like this,' or if I arrived upon it slowly, realizing it was my calling and that's what drew me to him..."