In response to graphic designer Nikola Prijic, Bill Skarsgård himself submitted an excerpt from an H.P. Lovecraft poem titled “Despair” — a becoming match in all kinds of the way for 2024’s “The Crow” — as one thing his character Eric may need tattooed on his physique. Prijic took the stanza from the poem that begins with “Evil wings in ether beating” and ends “in a cloud of madness,” laid it out in Procreate, and designed a customized stencil model that might be utilized to Skarsgård’s again whereas taking pictures the Rupert Sanders movie.
It’s at all times attention-grabbing when there’s a giant pretend tattoo plastered throughout an actor’s again like a billboard as a result of, in apply, it finally ends up functioning like a billboard for a movie protagonist’s characterization. Cultural assumptions about tattoos might not be as myriad because the totally different artwork kinds folks can apply to pores and skin, however tattoos are a fast visible shortcut to sign that characters are edgy and non-conformist, ex-military or mafia, tormented and inventive, and infrequently the entire above.
It’s an concept that artwork historian Matt Lodder has known as “overdetermination” and that his colleague Nikki Sullivan phrases “dermal diagnosis” — the concept that your tattoos reveal one thing about your interior fact or visually characterize core items of your identification. The idea has its roots within the work of Nineteenth-century criminologists looking for bodily manifestations of felony urges (with extraordinarily combined, racist outcomes). But it surely exists in its most inflexible kind in motion pictures and TV exhibits that wish to hammer dwelling to the viewers {that a} character is extra hardened, traumatized, or one way or the other extraordinary in comparison with company fits working workplace jobs.
“Rupert wanted his version of Eric to be a more modern version so he can resonate with the audience, with the kids today, so that’s why he looks like all these rappers that were really popular a few years ago,” Prijic advised IndieWire. “He wanted to portray this guy who has been through a lot, who had this troublesome childhood, drug problems, alcohol abuse problems.”
“The Crow” desires to create that impression in a few other ways. Prijic cited Lil Wayne particularly as a visible reference for Eric’s extra ornate tattoos, however he additionally wished the variety of tattoos to have a top quality all their very own. “He has a lot of shitty homemade, you know, ‘me and my friends are high and drunk’ tattoos,” Prijic stated. “Some tattoos are really nicely done, but you have layers upon layers, this scratcher-style, homemade, I’m just doodling with a needle on my arms tattoos, and he’s probably letting his friends do the same.”
These layers act as a visible shorthand for the years the film skips over between a traumatic incident in Eric’s childhood and the occasions of the movie correct. However each the essential and the extra ornate tattoos gesture in the direction of that East L.A. fashion, which itself is influenced by jailhouse tattooing and the photorealistic fashion of the artists at a store known as Good Time Charlie’s — now TattooLand — utilizing iconography resonant with Chicano tradition. “There’s a real particular kind of look of that style,” Lodder stated.
Shorthand is simply that, after all. It may well by no means wholly stand in for good characterization by different storytelling units — how a personality is framed, how they’re dressed, how they transfer and emote, what decisions they make, and if the film makes these decisions significant. Leaning too closely on tattoos to inform a personality’s story perpetuates the improper, incomplete assumptions and stereotypes that, admittedly, make tattoos so helpful to motion pictures within the first place.
“There are good sociological arguments to say that even the didactic account of this stuff, the idea that things must be encoded with a straightforward, readable meaning, is a learned behavior, right? It’s something you pick up from media, potentially,” Lodder stated. “That’s not something that tattoo collectors are really doing until the ’70s and ’80s. It comes from the outside very early on in the 19th century, but actually, people going to tattoo shops and talking about getting something that’s meaningful and narrative? That’s something that is much more fairly recent.”
No matter modern behaviors and assumptions are current within the act of tattooing, the method for film-ready tattoos has turn into much more streamlined in recent times. “The process is the same process as you can see on those kid stick-on tattoos. So basically, you print them on this special kind of paper, and there’s like a special adhesive to stick it to the actor,” Prijic stated. “The trick is to make them look realistic once they’re applied and not just on the computer.”
They will nonetheless look terrible, after all, however with extra superior, accessible stencil-printing expertise, it takes a selected set of artistic improper turns or deadline-pressured choices to make tattoos look as dangerous as they often do in older motion pictures, the place tattoos had been painted onto pores and skin. “The technology for that is getting a lot better than it used to,” Lodder stated. “The subversion of that is stuff where characters get tattooed, and it’s, like, instantly healed. The ‘Hangover’ movie is a classic for this one. There’s no redness, it’s like solid black and not shiny or scabbing or bleeding or anything.”
“The Crow” definitely doesn’t undergo from an absence of bleeding, and the graphic design group and make-up group labored collectively to make one explicit tattoo utility look as painful bodily because the impulse is emotional. “I always have to stick [my design] on a model in Photoshop and it helps me a lot. You get the opinion of the makeup artists and the director and then of course the actor, because if he doesn’t like it, you have to change it,” Prijic stated.
The copyright implications of tattoos on movie and TV now have clearer directives than beforehand, too. For a very long time, whether or not tattoos might be proven with out licensing was a nebulous query, with explicit instances of potential infringement being settled out of court docket. Perhaps probably the most well-known instance is the tattoo artist who created Mike Tyson’s facial tattoos and didn’t consent to have them used within the second “The Hangover” film; however the artist behind Rasheed Wallace’s tattoo was shocked that his work was animated as a part of a Nike advert, and Randy Orton’s tattoos had been damaged out as a customizable possibility for characters within the online game “WWE 2K,” one thing for which tattoo artist Catherine Alexander gained compensation at trial.
“Copyright for tattoos and movies was, for a long time, kind of an unsettled question because I think legal scholars suspected that the way that copyright law was written and copyright treaties were written did apply to tattooing, but it was unclear exactly how and what the remedies would be,” Lodder stated. “Producers now have a bit more clarity about where the lines are.”
That readability is a part of why exhibits like “The Bear” use make-up to cover Jeremy Allen White’s precise tattoo in favor of bespoke ones. “The Crow” likewise makes use of designs created particularly for the movie by Prijic and a pair tattoo artists, in addition to primary tattoo designs that got here ready-licensed from inventory libraries.
The method was very collaborative with Skarsgård, who, along with the H.P. Lovecraft quote, requested for a zipper code for a neighborhood in Sweden as a tattoo. It has nothing to do with Eric (who doubtless goes to the Afterlife earlier than he leaves america), however it’s this tiny little bit of which means encoded in a film tattoo.
