Text across the chest reads ‘He who is not with me is against me’. The swastika and Nazi symbols may mean that the owner has fascist sympathies, though they are more usually made as a protest and display of aggression towards the prison or camp administration. During the Soviet period the authorities often removed these tattoos by force either surgically or by using an etching method. A tattoo of a mermaid can indicate a sentence for rape of a minor, or child molestation. In prison jargon the nickname for a person who commits this type of crime is amurik meaning ‘cupid’, lohmatii ‘shaggy’, or a universal ‘all rounder’. They are ‘lowered’ in status by being forcibly sodomised by other prisoners, sometimes in groups. © Arkady Bronnikov / FUEL
