After both of his Jen exes -- wife Jennifer Garner and Bennifer-mate Jennifer Lopez -- joined the rest of the planet in mocking his phoenix back tattoo, Ben Affleck finally rose from the ashes of silence to explain the dang thing.

As you probably figured the second you first saw it, it's "fake for a movie."

That's what he confirmed to Mario Lopez's ExtraTV during an interview for "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice." Mario then said Ben probably wasn't at liberty to say anything further, and Ben began to say something about not wanting to, but added, "I actually do have a number of tattoos...but I try to have them in places where you don't have to do a lot of cover up...they get sort of addictive, tattoos, after a while."

There's a whole tattoo discussion, which you can watch in the Extra talk with Ben and Henry Cavill:

It's kind of a tense, or maybe just tired, chat. But here's a question: Why didn't Jennifer Garner know that the back tattoo was fake for a movie, if they are still close, raising their kids together and all that? And why is Ben just now confirming it's fake, only thanks to Extra, when we first saw that thing back on his film set in December -- when TMZ and Us Weekly claimed it was real, and he'd had it since July?

You could tell Ben didn't even want to delve into the subject, even though it's been a source of mockery from his exes, who both apparently thought it was real (or pretended to, anyway). Is someone not being entirely truthful here? David Fincher needs to get the rights to this mystery and make a thriller about it -- "The Gone Man With the Phoenix Tattoo."

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