At least thirty-seven per cent of male convicts and fifteen per cent of female convicts were tattooed by the time they arrived in the penal colonies, making Aus

For more than 30 years Danzig Baldayev was a prison warder in Kresty prison in St Petersburg. He collected more than 3000 images of Russian criminals' tattoos.

For centuries, Russian prison inmates forcibly initiated newcomers with tattoos. Gradually, prisoners developed a secret form of communication with their tattoo

In recent decades, tattoos have gone from being a subculture curiosity in Western culture to mainstream and commonplace. This two-volume set provides broad cove

An ethnography of the tattoo community, tracing the practice's transformation from a mostly male, working-class phenomenon to one adapted and propagated by a mo