Joker: Really,
really bad.
Matt Lodder: Whoever
designed the stencil for it
just typed up on a font on Word
and just stuck on his head.
My name's Dr. Matt Lodder.
I'm an art historian and
director of American studies
at the University of Essex.
I'm a historian of tattooing.
And today we're gonna be looking at some
tattoos in movies
to see if they're any good or not.
That kind of motto at the top of his back,
"Fortune favors the brave,"
is what it translates to.
It is apparently the motto of quite a lot
of, like, military regiments, including
a marine regiment from
Hawaii, which is where
Keanu Reeves traces his heritage from.
But also various other kind of
police forces and organizations.
So you can read in that potentially
some kind of military
history, that he's been
part of a marine unit, maybe.
Some of the tattoos on his shoulders
evoke Russian prison tattooing.
Some of his tattoos may
indicate, for example,
that he was very aggressive in prison.
The hands themselves are
copied pretty closely
from a print by Albrecht
Dürer, the engraver.
They have the right
kind of color tonality.
Like, really, really, really works.
Michael: I've got them on me.
Matt: Apparently the production crew got
really fed up, and he
got really fed up with
having to sit for hours
in wardrobe every day,
so they contrived this,
like, laser-removal scene.
He gets the whole bodysuit
removed in, like, one go.
Which would, like, would
literally kill you.
When you're lasering it, it basically
pops the skin cell, and it lets
your lymph nodes, your lymphatic system
use the sort of standard
bit of your body's
waste-disposal mechanisms
to remove the ink.
You'd need more than one
session to remove it.
You'd have loads of scarring.
And you'd be dead.
These were done by a
tattooer called Tom Berg.
Bonus points for getting
a tattooer to do it.
Iconically, like, beautifully done.
I think they're really, really nice,
and it's a clever kind
of conceit, I think.
Whether or not you'd get
away with it in real life,
I doubt it.
Highest-budget movie
at the time ever made, wasn't it?
But they couldn't afford a good
Chinese-English translator.
Linguistically, it's a mess.
So, it's got a Japanese
character in there.
Apparently geographically
it's a mess as well,
like, it doesn't actually
tell where it should be,
it points to, like, at least
four points on the globe,
so it wouldn't even be
that useful as a map.
Like, why in the 26th
century they're still doing
real '90s-looking tattoos?
That's a bit of thing.
Certainly was then, it certainly is now.
People getting very heavily tattooed
on their hands and their necks first,
so they can, like, kind of walk around
and look super heavily
tattooed even though
they haven't really got that many tattoos.
I wouldn't have said this
to Blade's face, obviously,
but it's a bit of a
hipster thing to be doing.
Really iconic.
Like, I think one of the reasons
you saw, like, spiky tribal everywhere
in the late '90s and early 2000s
is because loads of
people had seen "Blade"
and thought it looked awesome.
Places where skin tones are darker,
you find less tattooing traditionally,
because, you know, the
ink just doesn't show up
as well under black skin.
You know, tattooing has gone on to be a
really, really big,
important part of, like,
contemporary American black culture.
And, again, I think
probably Wesley Snipes' role
in this movie is a big
part of that. You know,
it sort of showed that tattoos
did look really awesome
on black skin if they're done well.
Batman: Died fighting next to me.
Aquaman: My point exactly.
Matt: On Momoa, they actually look pretty,
even in close-up, look
fairly like tattoos, actually.
They're not super black
like they've just been
painted on with black paint.
Aquaman's tattoos are kind
of Polynesian-inspired,
but they're not specifically
any particular Polynesian tradition.
Momoa's tattoos are Hawaiian.
Triangles around his arm.
In specific cultures,
there's a real kind of sense of connection
to one's ancestors and family.
And tattoos are a way of kind of
indicating connection to that.
The kind of hexagon
things on his breastplate
aren't particularly traditional,
but they kind of work, actually.
Joker: Oh, I'm not gonna kill you.
Matt: These probably are some of the
worst movie tattoos in
movie-tattoo history.
Whoever designed the stencil for it
just typed up on a font on Word
and just stuck on his head.
It's weird, 'cause,
like, the sort of overall
look of it is like 2003.
But some of the topography and things
are much more like now,
so it's sort of indicating that maybe
he got tattooed quite recently.
It just reminds me of, like, too many,
you know, 18-year-olds on Instagram,
who are getting their faces tattooed
'cause they think it
makes them look crazy.
These do look like transfers
rather than tattoos.
Although the panther on De Niro's arm
is his real tattoo.
In fact, apparently it was the first time
he'd shown that in film.
In more than the back piece, the pieces,
the script that are on his arms and stuff,
and the "Loretta" heart on his chest,
is that they look really bad.
They look really messed up.
Which would make sense if they were done,
you know, in prison, or intimately,
you know, not in a
professional tattoo shop.
Ed Hardy, the famous American tattooist,
did once describe
tattooing as like therapy.
And I think there's
something to that, right?
Like, you're getting tattooed,
you're being touched by a stranger,
and you can imagine it being this kind of
process of cathartic
conversation to produce it.
I mean, for the movie it works
as a real kind of
straightforward symbolism
of his character, you know,
he's a vengeful, you know, con.
What I think's a bit
self-defeating is that
if you want to be a secret
underground organization,
it's probably not that useful
to be marking yourself out as such,
particularly not in a place
that's really visible.
In a lot of criminal cultures
that have had traditional tattooing,
or have tattooing as
part of their initiation,
so, in Russia and in South America
and Japanese criminal gangs,
a lot of them are moving
away from tattooing now,
'cause it makes it a bit
harder to commit crime
if you're, like, marked out
as a member of the gang.
You know, four-leaf
clovers are really lucky,
so maybe a three-leaf clover
is, like, not lucky at all.
Is there some kind of connection to,
you know, superheros and mutants
and, you know, some other connection?
Some people are human,
some people are mutant,
some people are superheroes,
is that the connection? Who knows?
It's very heavy-handed.
Frankie: It's definitely daylight.
Matt: Clean-cut white boy, like, trying to
look tough in the early
2000s kind of tattooing.
Nautical star,
made famous by the guy from Blink 182.
Chinese characters.
Apparently one of them says "ice skating"?
One that says "criminal"
on the back. [laughs]
You can just sort of
imagine the prop designer
or the costume designer just, like,
flicking through and kind of,
"Yeah, like, what would this,
like, tough criminal guy,
oh, yeah, he'd definitely have 'criminal'
tattooed on his back, wouldn't he,
'cause that's what
hard-core criminals do."
You know, Google-image-searching, like,
"Chinese character tattoos" or "tattoos"
and getting that, like,
nautical-star tattoo up.
Cross on his arm, I think, is
definitely his real tattoo.
They're not the kind of thing that
are particularly kind of accurate
for the kind of things
people are getting done
in prison in that period,
but they're quite kind
of standard, you know,
suburban-white-boy-trying-
to-look-tough tattoos
from that period, a bit.
They're a bit David Beckham,
they're a bit kind of
Chicano-prison-inspired.
Draco: I was chosen.
Matt: Tattoos are really
indicative of, like,
some kind of character flaw, right?
This idea of, like, stigmata again.
The idea that somehow
people's evil or badness
is, like, manifested on their skin.
It's a pretty problematic idea.
It leads to some pretty dodgy places.
That, like, somehow we can read
people's character by what they look like.
So, skulls and snakes, like,
are really traditional tattoo images.
I mean, we find them, you know,
right back into the, like, 17th century.
The memento mori of the skull,
you know, "Everyone will die."
Even in pre-Christian mythologies,
but certainly in Christianity,
we associate the snake with
the serpent, with evil,
and with the corruption
of humanity and stuff.
So, together, work really, really well
as sort of allegories of human fragility.
And it is produced in the movie as this,
you know, it's quite nice
placement, for example.
I mean, you know, thanks a lot, Voldemort,
centering it on my arm, not just
sticking it somewhere randomly.
Norrington: Fetch some irons.
Well, well, Jack Sparrow, isn't it?
Matt: These films are
set in the sort of 1730s?
The idea that there
was no tattooing, like,
before Captain Cook
turns out not to be true.
And there is tattooing
in the European fleets,
on European bodies,
right the way at least
from the 17th century,
beginning of the 17th
century all the way through.
Would a sailor in 1730
have a tattoo of this kind?
Probably not, like, it's a bit more like
a kind of 1920s, 1930s sailor tattoo,
actually, I have to say.
It looks a bit too neat,
a bit too nicely done,
200 years too early for that design.
Norrington: Well, well,
Jack Sparrow, isn't it?
Matt: So, you might hear,
for example, that, like,
"Oh, a swallow tattoo means
you've crossed the equator."
Or a swallow tattoo means you've done
so many miles at sea, or so
many days at sea or something.
If that it is true, it
would have only been true
in particular, narrow context.
So, in the context of particular fleets
or particular moments in time.
There's not a huge amount of kind of
iconographic complexity going on.
So to go, "Oh, you've got
a swallow tattooed on you,
you must be Jack Sparrow,"
seems pretty unlikely to me.
The movie's set in the '80s,
so that tattoo would've
been done in the '80s
or maybe even the late '70s.
And, like, there are
certain, certainly tattooists
who were doing kind of
blacks, or fantasy black and gray.
But that really looks like
an early 2000s tattoo.
The horns are very reminiscent of the work
of a guy called Paul Booth,
who was a real kind of pioneer of, like,
Gothic, dark, black-and-gray
tattooing in the '90s.
The way it's been stuck on as well,
it looks like it's still healing,
like, as if he's only just had it done,
which seems unreasonable to me.
Stu: Oh.
Matt: It was obviously
kind of a comedic reference
to Mike Tyson's tattoo.
The tattooist sued the
film studio and said,
"You've infringed my
copyright on my artwork."
Right? "I am the artist."
And it went to court.
Warner Bros. did threaten
to have to digitally alter the film,
but eventually they settled.
In the 19th century, men got tattooed
in the Americas and in the Pacific
and ended up performing as tattooed men
in the circuses and in freak shows.
And telling the story
that they were forcibly
captured and tattooed against their will.
The Great Omi, he, in the 1930s,
had his face tattooed in black,
and really kind of,
actually, very progressively.
And he would, again, use that as a story
that he was captured by jungle natives
and tattooed against his will by savages,
but it was done by a guy
on Waterloo Road in London.
Carl: Yeah, well, I was
the one that said it.
Matt: There's no tattooing
like that, really.
Certainly not in kind
of itinerant circles,
in non-really-high-end,
really cutting-edge studios,
and there weren't really many high-end
tattoo studios in 1969.
So it's just really grating, actually,
that the production designers
just hadn't really looked
at any tattooed people.
Maybe it's OK, 'cause
they're meant to be magic.
So, again, maybe we can forgive him.
But, like, if this guy
had been tattooed in 1969,
this would've been, like,
so cutting-edge and so cool.
You know, there were
plenty of people who were
heavily tattooed coming
out of the war of this age.
But you wouldn't be covered in stuff
that looked like it was from a kind of
hippy free sheet from San Francisco.
Four, four out of 10, something like that.
Producer: It is a hot mess.
Matt: It is a hot mess.
The tattoos on the outriders' chests
are sort of done,
which tell the story of, like,
of guarding Imhotep and stuff.
They're done, like, while
Imhotep's still alive.
In the universe of the movie,
why these characters
would have these symbols
before the plot of the
movie actually happens,
and then why they'd be
surprised about it happening,
'cause it's on their bodies already?
The British Museum mummies
actually do have tattoos on them
that are figural, they
seem to be animal designs.
And we find much more recent ones,
so about 2,000-year-old,
3,000-year-old mummies
that have religious marks and things.
But that kind of facial tattooing,
I think the production
designers have probably
tried to draw some inspiration from
wider North African tattoo traditions,
like the Berber people.
But even in those cultures,
that kind of facial tattooing
would more often be, almost exclusively
be on women rather than men.
[screaming]
Pretty racist, because they're obviously
using tattooing to signal
some kind of otherness
and primitiveness and strangeness.
A mess filmically. They
just don't look very good.
And, yeah, just bonkers, really.
