Criminal tattoo


Criminal tattoos are a type of tattoos associated with criminals to show gang membership and record the wearer's personal history—such as their skills, specialties, accomplishments, incarceration, world view and/or means of personal expression. Tattoos are strongly empirically associated with deviance, personality disorders, and criminality.
Certain tattoo designs have developed recognized coded meanings. The code systems can be quite complex and because of the nature of what they encode, the designs of criminal tattoos are not widely recognized as such to outsiders.
gang member with a tattoo showing his gang membership
has the organization's name tattooed on his abdomen

Tattooing in prison

Since tattooing in prison is illegal in the United States, the inmates do not have the proper equipment necessary for the practice. This forces inmates to find ways to create their own tattooing devices out of their belongings. Improvised tattooing equipment has been assembled from materials such as mechanical pencils, magnets, radio transistors, staples, paper clips or guitar strings.
N. Banerjee wrote in 1992 for The Wall Street Journal about tattoos in Russian prisons:

Russia and former Soviet republics

Russian criminal tattoos have a complex system of symbols which can give quite detailed information about the wearer. Not only do the symbols carry meaning but the area of the body on which they are placed may be meaningful too. The initiation tattoo of a new gang member is usually placed on the chest and may incorporate a rose. A rose on the chest is also used within the Russian mafia. Wearing false or unearned tattoos is punishable in the criminal underworld, usually by removal of the tattoo, followed by beatings and sometimes rape, or even murder. Tattoos can be removed by bandaging magnesium powder onto the surface of the skin, which dissolves the skin bearing the marks with painful caustic burns. This powder is gained by filing "light alloy" e.g. lawnmower casing and is a jailhouse commodity.
"As Russia's leading expert on tattoo iconography, Mr. Arkady Bronnikov can tell the prisoner's story from looking at the designs on his body. The huge spider in a web that is drawn on his skull reveals, in prison tattoo code, that he is a drug addict. Also, he is a repeat offender: The onion domes of a Russian church fan across his shoulder blades, each of the seven domes representing a different stay in prison. Above the church, across the back of his neck, the convict has stencilled, in Russian, "Not just anyone can hold his head this high."... "The more tattoos a convict gets, the more sentences he has served, the more respect he gets in prison," says the 66-year-old Mr. Bronnikov. "The tattoos show that he isn't afraid of pain."
Tattoos made in a Russian prison often have a distinct bluish color and usually, appear somewhat blurred because of the lack of instruments to draw fine lines. The ink is often created from burning the heel of a shoe and mixing the soot with urine, and injected into the skin utilizing a sharpened guitar string attached to an electric shaver.
"In prison, the ink for tattoos was manufactured from molten rubber mixed with water and sugar. Artists used sewing needles sharpened on concrete cell floors. Sometimes, portraits of Stalin and Lenin--with or without horns--were in fashion, sometimes monasteries and medieval knights. Occasionally, caricatures of Communists with pig snouts or correctional officers in wolf guise were the rage. Maps of the gulag system, with Russia, portrayed as a giant prison camp might be etched across someone's back. Crucifixion scenes were popular. Ronald Reagan was even a subject, according to a Russian dictionary of prison slang."
In addition to voluntary tattooing, tattoos are used to stigmatize and punish individuals within the criminal society. These tattoos may be placed on an individual who fails to pay debts in card games, or otherwise breaks the criminal code, and often have very blatant sexual images, embarrassing the wearer. Tattoos on the forehead are sometimes forcibly applied, and designed both to humiliate the bearer and warn others about him or her. They frequently consist of slurs about the bearer's ethnicity, sexual orientation, or perceived cooperation with the prison authorities. They can indicate that the holder is a member of a political group considered offensive by other prisoners, or has been convicted of a crime which is disapproved of by other criminals. They can also advertise that the bearer is "downcast", or of the lowest social caste in prison, usually used for sexual gratification of higher ranked inmates. Voluntary facial tattoos signify that the bearer does not expect to be released back into normal society within his lifetime, and will usually consist of tattoos on the eyelids of messages such as "Don't Wake Me Up." They are managed by inserting a metal spoon under the eyelid, so the tattoo needle does not pierce the eye.
Tattoos that consist of political or anti-authoritarian statements are known as "grins". They are often tattooed on the stomach of a thief in law, as a means of acquiring status in the criminal community. A Russian criminologist, Yuri Dubyagin, has claimed that, during the Soviet era, there existed "secret orders" that an anti-government tattoo must be "destroyed surgically", and that this procedure was usually fatal. Tattoos of the portraits of Soviet leaders like Lenin and Stalin were often applied on the chest due to a belief that firing squads were forbidden to shoot at the leaders' pictures.

Motifs

Common body tattoos and their significance :
There is another category of tattoos—of rings on the fingers and symbols on the hands—which informs other inmates of the bearer's rank when the bearer is clothed:
During the Edo period of Japan, kyōkaku, urban "chivalrous commoners" or "street knights" typically wore irezumi, prominent full-body tattoos. Kyōkaku operated as cultural outlaw figures and were frequently used as characters in Japanese kabuki performance.
Current yakuza have full-body tattoos, typically inked in secret by tattoo artists associated with clans. Due to a clear association between tattoo artistry and crime, the practice was shortly banned following the Meiji restoration. During the US occupation after WWII, this law was repealed. Modern yakuza tattoos, with common symbols and visual motifs are noted for their similarity to current Western tattoo styles.
Issey Miyake, a Japanese influential fashion director, has taken inspiration from Japanese prison tattoo culture to design wearable fashion similar to irezumi, "creating a jumpsuit with a tattoo motif that looked literally like a wearable second skin...".

Australia

Prisoners who were transported from Britain to Australian penal colonies between 1787 and 1867 were sometimes tattooed with marks intended to signify disgrace, for example D for deserter. Prisoners often modified these tattoos to conceal the original design or to express wry or rebellious messages.
A common prison tattoo in Australia is 'A.C.A.C.' - the initials to a derogatory phrase regarding cops.

Europe

France

In France, five dots tattoo resembling the dots on a dice, placed on the hand between index finger and thumb are found on prison inmates. This tattoo represents the individual between the four walls of the prison cell ; this also has the same meaning in Russia and Spain.
Tattoos of three dots on the hand means "death to cops".
A single dot on the cheek usually means the wearer is a pimp.
A stick figure holding a trident is also a common French prison tattoo.

Italy

"La Stidda," a Mafia-style criminal organization in Sicily, is known for using star tattoos to identify members.

North America

Common tattoos are names of relatives or gang members, symbols of aggression, tattoos advertising a particular skill, or religious imagery. One of the most well-known criminal tattoos is the teardrop tattoo.
Another common tattoo in American prisons and jails, especially for Hispanic inmates, is four dots or three dots. The dots represent that you have earned your keep in your gang. The three dots would represent the 13 of the southern gangs and the same for the northern gangs with
four dots :: for 14.

Tattoos for Prostitutes

Forced and enslaved prostitutes are often tattooed or branded with a mark of her owners. Women and girls being forced into prostitution against their will may have their boss' name or gang symbol inked or branded with a hot iron on their skin. In some organizations involved with the trafficking of women and girls, like the mafias, nearly all prostitutes are marked. Some pimps and organizations use their name or well-known logo, while others use secret signs.
Some years ago the branding mark was usually small, only recognized by other pimps, and sometimes hidden between the labia minora, but today some "owners" write their names in big letters all upon the body of the victim.

Citations