It seemed to be the perfect act of revenge, a cruel lover tattooed a picture of flies over poop on his ex-girlfriend’s back — and the photo swept the internet.

But according to MailOnline, it is not what people thought it to be when it comes to the story of ‘Rossie Brovent’s poo tattoo’.

Brovent, a resident of Dayton, Ohio, was reportedly suing her ex-boyfriend and tattoo artist Ryan Fitzjerald for $100,000 over the poop drawing on her back.

Fitzjerald was said to be angry at Brovent for cheating on him with a friend and got her drunk before she signed a consent form agreeing on a design ‘at the artist’s discretion’. She initially wanted an image of Narnia.

However, the story itself — which originally reported on the VeryWeirdNews website— has been thrown into doubt.

According to MailOnline, the picture of the poop tattoo appeared on the Ugliest Tattoos blog, part of the Fail Blog group of websites, as far back as December 2009.

The truth is that the photo was sourced from the Polish social network website Nasza-klasa, which translates as ‘our class’, and the caption on the photo lists the month in Polish as January, without a year, and the name of ‘Ania’.

MailOnline said that a court official at Dayton Municipal Court —where the lawsuit would most likely have been filed— that they had no record of either ‘Rossie Brovent’ or ‘Ryan Fitzjerald’ in their records system.

In the VeryWeirdNews article from November 21, Brovent is quoted but with no contact address, email, or phone number listed on the website.

“He tricked me by drinking a bottle of cheap wine with me and doing tequila shots before I signed it and got the tattoo,’ she is quoted as saying,” Brovent allegedly said. “Actually I was passed out for most of the time, and woke up to this horrible image on my back.”

The photo went viral since it was picked up by the mainstream media, but it now appears the image has been floating around blogs for years and there is no civil lawsuit as has been reported.