Lena Dunham’s ‘Eloise’ tattoo leads to a documentary

Sonia Recchia/Getty Images for Sundance Lena Dunham, creator of “Girls” and now executive producer of “It’s Me, Hilary: The Man Who Drew Eloise”

Only in Lena Dunham’s world. Her first tattoo, done in a New Mexico strip mall, led to a unexpected friendship and the making of a Sundance film. The “Girls” creator told Confidenti@l the unlikely report — of both the ink and the film, “It’s Me, Hilary: The Man Who Drew Eloise” — at its premiere.

To start with the tattoo: Dunham, who is the executive producer of the fleeting about Hilary Knight, the illustrator of the well-known “Eloise” children’s books, says she got a tattoo of the character on her lower back when she was 17.

“I had been begging and begging (to be allowed to have a tattoo). And my dad was like, ‘Well, I don’t want you to go to some trashy place, so we’ll go together,’ ” she told us at the Egyptian Theater in Park City, Utah. “It was in a strip mall in Taos but they really did the job, and my whole family was with me and they were very supportive of it, and it’s graced my body for the 11 years since.”

“That was my first tattoo because it felt like the only thing that I knew I would never get sick of,” said Dunham, “My childhood affinity for her never wavered. and I felt so connected to the character, and tattoos are about self-expression and self-information, and that seemed like the perfect entrée into this.

“I think so many young women were obsessed with Eloise’s unruly magic,” she said. “She’s just such a remarkably independent, vanity-free, complex little girl, and as a little girl you don’t see that many representations of yourself beyond a good little child with pigtails. So it was meaningful.”

“The tattoo is what caused Hilary Knight to make friend with me,” said the actress/director/author/producer. Having heard there was an up-and-coming TV star with a tattoo of his work, “he sent me a letter, which is very ancient-school, and some signed books, which, obviously, for an Eloise fanatic is a huge deal.”

Dunham said that after striking up a friendship with the 88-year-ancient New Yorker, she “very quickly realized that he had a very unique report that looked-for to be told and that (her friend Matt Wolf, who directed the film) was the person to tell it.”

“It’s Me, Hilary” was accepted into the Sundance festival’s documentary-shorts category and will air on HBO.