Prison Tattoos

The appeal of tattoos in jail is easy to understand: in a place where all freedoms are confiscated, marking one’s own skin is the one thing that cannot be taken away. Jailbirds risk cross-contamination to have their mark of individuality in an environment that is designed to dehumanize. As you would image the lack of sterilising facilities make cross-contaimination extremely high.

Tattoos in jail take on a very significant meaning with most being territorial and culturally defined within specific nationalities.  These rough and undefined tattoos are made with rudimentary homemade machines which sometime use just needles and ink. Ink is often made from urine or shampoo mixed with soot. The poor equipment and lack of coloured ink hinders the quality of the work a tattooist can perform.

Prison Tattoo Meanings

Laden with meaning, jail tattoos tell a story with visual symbols. The teardrop is a classic example for this. Originally, a teardrop near the eye was a counter for the people the wearer had killed. Now, it has also come to signify the number of lost loved ones or the number of terms in prison the wearer bears.

Another tattoo people serving time get is tattoo of a spiderweb on an elbow or a neck.  It comes from the notion that a spider web catches and imprisons its prey.

Barbed wire tattooed across the forehead signifies a sentence of life imprisonment without possibility of parole.

A career thief will often have tattoo of a cat. A single cat means the bearer worked alone; several cats mean the bearer was part of a gang.

Hate Tattoos

Not surprisingly prisons are the place where most hate tattoos are inked. as many convicts entering the prison population are affiliated with the hate or racist movement before their incarceration. In prison, new convicts from different ethnic backgrounds often join racist gangs once inside . Many of them do this for protection, not just because they adhere to the gang’s racist ideology.

Popular hate tattoos include:

• The Celtic Cross: It is part of the racist white power movement.
• The Swastika Symbol of the Nazi party.
• The SS: two sig runes were the symbol of the Schutzstaffel, Nazi insignia.

Recently, prisoners have become very creative with where and how they tattoo themselves. The producers of the prison documentary television show, Lock Up, were stunned when they several inmates who had tattooed the whites of their eyes.

“Everybodys got tattoos. Eveybodys got stretched ears, but you never see anybody with the whites of their eyes tatooed”