Scanned page of numbered black and white drawings of Russian prison tattoo symbols, including a hand with a boar's head and lettering across the fingers.

Reference sheet of Russian prison tattoo symbols

Hand · Black and grey · Flash

A scanned printed page of numbered black and white drawings of Russian criminal tattoo symbols, with Cyrillic captions beside each one. Most motifs are simple geometric shapes, crosses, stars and stylised emblems, drawn in solid black outline and fill. A large hand in the centre carries a boar's head and lettering across its fingers and knuckles.

Hand Hand Cross Star Diamond Crown Lettering

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tamara, the sheet came back from the binders with a coffee ring across the middle, so I have spent most of Thursday tracing the drawings again by hand. You asked why the department keeps these pages at all. A warden in Perm once told me that a man's shoulder can say a whole sentence before he opens his mouth, and somebody has to know how to read it, even if that somebody only sits in a cold reading room with a magnifier and a flask of tea.

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The hand in the centre is the one the young inspectors always ask about, with the boar's head across the knuckles and the lettering running along the fingers. I counted the letters twice. Nobody will say on the record what it means, so I wrote a translation in pencil in the margin, where it can be rubbed out if the director objects.

On Tuesday a boy from the transit cell came up to the reading room with his sleeve pushed back and a plain ink line along his wrist. He asked whether it was on the sheet. It was not. I told him I could find nothing that matched, and he laughed and said it was the first honest answer anyone had given him all year. I gave him a pencil, and he drew his own mark on the back of a requisition form, a small square with the corners cut off, and asked me to keep it.

I have pinned his square under the glass beside the boar. It looks ridiculous next to the rest of the page. Write soon, and tell me whether the Vologda copy has the same smudge over number 649.