What does a tattoo mean to you? An attempt to manifest your life philosophy (which changes from year to year), a tribute to something beautiful, or a constant reminder that you're a drunken fool and your friends once bought a tattoo machine on eBay?
In life, tattoos range from the profound to the trivial, and in video games they are almost always imbued with meaning. Small stamps are very meaningful, they are often taken for granted and remain incomprehensible to us until we examine their backstory. They can be a code showing the meaning of an obscure origin, tribal markings referring the hero to a particular nation or explaining the trials he has gone through.
Existing in an environment where the only limitation is the imagination of the developer, tattoos always show the poetic liberty of the creator to prove that they are not just blotches. Sometimes tribal tattoos play roles that look very down-to-earth in real life, but in a game we can give them a second, deeper thought.
This list is a reflection on tattoos, so let me know in the comments if you've ever taken the drastic step and branded any of the game characters on your body or if you're just planning on it, so you know for sure what each of the tattoos mean.
Kratos is the god of war.
Looking at this angry hero, it's easy to see that red lightning bolt tattoos are a necessary part of his appearance. Without it, he would just look like a skinny, jelly-faced man who spends too much time indoors. But once a family man, Kratos actually signed himself with these markings as a tribute to his younger brother Deimos.
The story goes that Ares and Athena raided Kratos' hometown in search of a Spartan with a lightning-shaped birthmark on the left side of his body. In their opinion, this man could overthrow the gods of Olympus! Deimos had such a birthmark, and Ares kidnapped him and put him to death. Kratos subsequently branded himself to repeat the fate of his doomed brother and set out to take revenge on the gods. Of course, we now know that this was all a big misunderstanding, and the gods thought Kratos' tattoos were actually birthmarks. But this man was seriously destined to rip them all to shreds. So much senseless violence over a single drawing is actually not a badly contrived plot.
Meaning for Men
Sometimes original tattoos in the form of a bar code are chosen by representatives of the stronger sex. Men often choose as unusual drawings important in life numbers. Such tattoos for men mean:
- Unusualness
- desire for self-expression
- A protest against venality.
Tattoo with the image of a bar code on the strong man's body is very rarely made as an original body image. More often than not, representatives of the strong sex choose such tattoos as a protest, a challenge.
In such a way a man wants to show his stand concerning the existing venality and to emphasize the difference between a person and a product.
Also a man may get such a tattoo, as he simply has a desire to express himself and show his originality to others.
Agent 24 - Hitman
Agent 47 is a well-known barcode that is a constant reminder that the protagonist is a product designed to kill, a machine that does its job effectively and in cold blood. The barcode also says something to us gamers as well. Hitman games have always had a mission to tell the story of Tattoo 47 and point out its meaning, because the barcode confronts you every time you start playing this masterpiece.
The 47 barcode is more unique than the one you might find on milk or a couple of chicken breasts at the supermarket. 47 is one among hundreds of assassins created by a genetically engineered agency, and those two numbers distinguish Hitman from any other agent in existence.
Hitman's barcode has deadly connotations in the game world, but they were discovered years ago; in real life this mark is most harmless. Using your phone to scan barcode 47 will give you a very funny result, as it will take you to a page describing a product such as a dildo.
Because of this silly joke, Agent 47's name will now fade, but maybe this is a chance for us to go to Agent 48? Maybe we should make sure the 48 barcode doesn't indicate a sex toy.
Duke Nukem - Duke Nukem 3D.
Once upon a time in the '90s, this jokester, the Duke of humor, was killing aliens, accompanying everything with his scintillating anecdotes.
So when he spots a copy machine at the police station, he does what any dumb guy in the office would do - pulls down his pants, puts his bare "cheeks" on the glass and presses the big button. But the resulting scan reveals something just as interesting as the hero's ass - a heart-shaped tattoo with the name "Lani" on the heel. Does the hero really have true love? Maybe he never wanted to declare it to the world? Is he really a one-woman man who simply fills his loneliness with women under his control, rescued from aliens?
Although the name "Lani" appears in several games about Duke Nukem, he never reveals the mystery. Instead, he jokingly refers to Lani Minella, an actress who was very much in the TV series.
Far Cry 3 Game Announcement
At the center of the plot of this video game is a character named Jason Brody. According to the plot, the main character together with his friends goes to rest on a beautiful tropical island. Beautiful views, clear water, wonderful company. However, such an idyll lasts only a short time. The player is almost immediately plunged into a lot of events.
After a parachute jump, Jason and his companions are captured by pirates, led by a real sadist. As the game progresses, phrases emerge that allow you to conclude that the leader is also a cannibalistic pirate.
The heroes decide to escape, carefully preparing for it, learning the skills of combat, but something does not go according to plan. As a result, only Jason Brody survives. His brother, who helped devise the escape plan, is left to die in the hands of bloodthirsty pirates. As a mockery, the main character is asked to escape in thirty seconds, which he tries to do. As a result, the ropeway that Jason is running on is destroyed and the hero falls into a deep gorge. Such a plot twist immediately draws the players into the process, but the main part of the game is just ahead.
Corv - disgraced.
The intriguing sign on his arm disgracing the enigmatic hero is one of the most elegant and coolest tattoos in the game world. Like many of us in real life, Corv notices it when he wakes up and has no memory of what happened to him. It turns out that the new tattoo is not just a regret of the result after drinking, but a stamp that grants people supernatural abilities: teleportation, double-jumping, and turning into animals.
What's more, the tattoo glows when Corv performs one of the tricks that would make any normal person just peel their skin off. I'm sure this tattoo sometimes makes Korv's flesh burn from the inside out, and that's enough to call this one of the best tattoos in video games.
Tattoo of movie characters.
Here the undisputed leader is Heath Ledger's character, the tattoo joker. Not even Tyler Durden from Fight Club and Hatter from Alice could surpass him. Overall, this particular joker is very different from the classic joker sketch, a favorite character of card cheats.
The meaning of the tattoo lies in the character of the character. Courage, bordering on madness, self-confidence and, of course, charisma. By tattooing the joker played by Ledger, a person is trying to awaken these very qualities in him.
Movie classics are also in vogue. The Hobbit, Harry Potter, the Mask, the Ghost Rider - all these characters occupy a worthy place in the list of popular tattoos. The significance of each character should also be sought in his or her movie character. However, such tattoos can simply serve as a tribute or attachment to the movie in general, rather than to the character in particular.
Jack - Mass Effect
If you're bloodthirsty and imprisoned in some super-prison and you know you'll never get a taste of freedom, how do you deal with it? Tattoos! Lots of tattoos ensure that you turn yourself into formidable freaks that no one in your life will want to strangle or, conversely, fawn over.
Which in a way explains all the beauty of Jack from Mass Effect. The tattoos on her back, on both arms depict the number of guards she has killed along with the methods that were used in the process. And the female faces on her left arm give us a hint of what Jack might have looked like.
The large round tattoo on her upper back was added by a guard in a prison called "Purgatory" and denotes her origins and the years she spent inside, while the drops in the lower left corner indicate how many gang members she killed. Those quirky skeletons below her neck say she is close to humanity and also show the ship she was born on.
Tattoo designs and styles
Professional tattoo masters can offer ready-made sketches of tattoo characters or draw a personal tattoo, including in the image of the hero iconic details for the owner. The main thing is that the customer's requests fit harmoniously into the overall stylistic picture. As for the style solutions, in this category of tattoos prevail full-color work done in such directions as:
- Newscool, distinguished by an abundance of bright colors;
- watercolor. It is more suitable for delicate cartoon images;
- Blackwork is indispensable for lovers of monochrome and oppressive, dark images.
However, the choice of style will also depend entirely on the original drawing. The main rule is character recognition. It is not necessary to fall into naturalism. It is enough to keep the main details.
Vega - a street fighter
Vega's minimum tattoos are faded snakes, which are the hallmark of an androgynous Spanish street fighter. So far, snakes are not particularly associated with anything with us except the interpretation used in the West, where they signify poisoning, strangulation, and so on. In Japan, however, these signs are associated with the notorious Yakuza criminal organization. Akira Yasuda thus declared that Vega would play the real villain.
The tattoo speaks of both elegance and deadliness, all combined with claws and a mask, which is the hallmark of Vega's appearance.
The purple color of the tattoo also alludes to Vega's noble upbringing, during which he studied bullfighting and ninjutsu, and combined that to turn himself into the killing machine he is today.
Tai Kaliso - Gears Of War.
The game packs the most dumb-ass heroes, and Tai Kaliso towers among them, as he also doesn't mind saying some words of wisdom once in a while. Inspired by New Zealand and the Maori tribes, Kaliso is a warrior among warriors and his tribal tattoos prove it.
The neo-tribal tattoos that adorn Kaliso are called bakuaja, which is common among the lrohma tribes-they are people who are forever mired in warfare, and honor and fearlessness accompany them throughout their lives.
Kaliso's tattoos are designed to make him most fearful in battle. Unfortunately for Big Ty himself, he has lost many fights. There's nothing worse than tattoos that aren't appreciated and don't know what they're for. Just to impress is not what tattoos are for, in fact my ex-girlfriend once laughed at me when I tattooed her name under my nipple.
Tribal tattoos. A bit of reality
It's worth noting that warrior tattoos weren't just used in games. Originally, the image on a person's skin was invented by tribes from Polynesia. They believed that such drawings helped warriors to come with the booty, stay alive and healthy. That is, the original purpose of tattoos was to protect and appeal to the gods. It was from Polynesia that the first images were brought. Sailors tattooed on their bodies in hopes of protecting themselves from sea monsters, storms or just bad luck.
Later, tattoos in tribes began to denote class as well. For example, there were different images on the body of a common warrior and the head of the tribe. Shamans were decorated from head to toe with magical signs. It was believed that this allowed not only people but also deities to better orientate who was who.
Rei Kurosawa - Fatal frame
If you're feeling a little underwhelmed by tattoos, then you exist to be despised. But you might find some solace in the body art of the main character of Fatal Frame, because her tattoos are done because of a predicament.
In Fatal Frame 2, poor Rei Kurosawa gets a curse in the form of tattoos that gradually grow on her body and crawl all over it, which is quite deadly for the heroine. The tattoo itself looks pretty good on Rei - a thin, twisted design of snakes that signify mourning and mental anguish.
The tattoos are free and appear on their own, or rather without the needle that everyone is used to. In some ways, it would be the perfect tattoo, were it not for the fact that it comes complete with other symptoms: hallucinations, nightmares, and a little-not a little- death.
The Nameless One - Planescape: Torment
Since there's cloud storage and Google Calendar today, the idea of using your body as a journal seems like old hat, it's more typical of the pre-2007 period. Desperate to piece together the events of his past life, Nameless, with scratches and tattoos, tracks his hallucinogenic interdimensional existence.
His back is covered with symbols that remind him of his past life. On his right shoulder is a symbol of torment, which constantly reminds all people of the hero's long-suffering fate, of those who betrayed him. It depicts the spirit who was the previous reincarnation of Nameless, and whose fate is intertwined with his fate.
But Nameless' marks serve a higher purpose. As you progress through the game, you are credited with more and more tattoos, which give the hero special abilities like strength, a booster, and also fill the hero's body to know what he was like before.
Symbolism
A body image with a barcode might seem strange enough. But sometimes it becomes a choice for both men and women. Such a tattoo appeared not so long ago and has already managed to gain fans.
Especially such a body image is popular among young people who want to stand out. And if for some people such a tattoo is an original body image, for others such a tattoo will be a kind of challenge and even a protest against all those people for whom there is no distinction between a person and a sellable thing.
During the application of the tattoo with a bar code is often used lucky or important in life numbers. Sometimes the date of birth is chosen as such an image.
Jason Brody - Far Cry 3.
As Nameless, this annoying camper turns into a killing machine and has tattoos that constantly fill his body to gain superpowers.
It all starts with a small stigma that grows throughout the game as Jason gains more and more abilities to kill, and eventually his tattoo covers his entire arm. The tattoo consists of signs that are popular with the Aztecs--they are herons, sharks, spiders--each image symbolizes a specific set of abilities that slowly turns Jason into a tribal warrior.
But the more murderous abilities Jason gains through the tattoo, the more he loses control of reality. Sure Jason grows as a man, but he also turns into a killer. Jason has to go through quite a bit to get that last piece of tattooing-it's psychedelic orgies, drugs, sex, and murder that are worth a lot more than a small piece of drawing.
Tattoos of other ethnicities.
Don't think that only tribes became adherents of tattoos. Slavs also actively used protective images on the body to appease deities and gain their protection.
For example, the image of lightning was often used to placate Perun, the supreme god. Therefore, in the game tattoos (Far Cry 3) are not surprising to those who are familiar with the history of body images. Every warrior had to have his mark not only to be distinguished from the crowd, but also for added protection.
Red XIII.
It was no great fun to get signature tattoos, as everything would simply become an empty husk - the creature would not be able to function normally in the world and would be mutilated.
This was the fear of Red XIII's life, a creature that looks like a lion dog. The tattoos on his left front leg are deliberately etched, the experiments of the mad Professor Hojo, who wanted to create creatures by injecting them with injections of alien origin. XIII means only that he was 13th in line to be tested.
Fortunately for Red, it turned out that he was not a simple Sephiroth clone, but his role in the experiments was to be mated with Iris in order to create long-lived demigods. There were clearly logistical problems in this process due to the fact that Red Dog is a humanoid, but such points did not deter Hojie from experimenting.
Kazuma Kiryu - Yakuza.
A classic example of one of the tattoos I mentioned is the tattoos you get when you're in a romantic relationship and then break up a month later. Kazuma received one in full dragon form on his back when he joined the Yakuza criminal organization. However, once he is released from prison after a decade of incarceration, Yakuza announces a bounty on his head.
The tattoo helped earn Kazuma the nickname "the Dragon of Dojima. In Japanese mythology, dragons symbolize leadership and embody the yin and yang - the duality of light and darkness.
Kazuma may be one of the most underappreciated characters on the list, but his tattoos were also in the real world when they appeared on the backs of fans. In March 2014, Sega held a contest in which there was a prize of a Kazuma tattoo that cost $9,000.
The winner was Fari Salievsky, a trainer living in Australia, who had to spend four hours each week (and there were six!) to get the coveted tattoo. You can see the result in the picture above.
Jin Kazama - Tekken
It probably looks like the '90s, because by today's standards this tattoo isn't cool. But Gene has a tribal tattoo on his left bicep for a reason, to draw undue attention to himself.
Despite his shabby appearance, Gene's tattoos aren't just "ink under the skin," they're more of a birthmark. Jin has the devil's seal of his nemesis Kazuya, whom you can see in the introductory video for Tekken 3. The tattoo is linked to the devil gene that Jin unfortunately carries, which makes him susceptible to turning into a demonic being from time to time (but that doesn't mean he flies and shoots lasers out of his eyes).
Is the brand a constant reminder of Gene's alter ego? I don't know, but this tattoo is certainly better than a tattoo on the biceps of men who go to the gym.
What style of tattoo is appropriate for a barcode tattoo
Various styles are used, but blackwork is considered the most popular. This newstyle serves as a successful substitute for pronounced patterns and intricate ornaments. What is it? It is the painting of marked parts of the body with the addition of patterns through geometric shapes. The result is a spectacular and original ornament on the body.
Cognitive!
The application of unique tattoos, called OR-code, is used quite often. The digital encryption of the ornament is recognized by the scanner program of the smartphone.
On the screen of the mobile device there are links for deciphering the information.
Tattoos for girls
The advantage of the barcode tattoo is the ability to be adapted to the uniqueness of a woman's style. For example, the "introduction" in the middle of the composition of the heart is not spaced, to emphasize the romanticism of the fairer sex. And also the possibility of sectional coloring of the code in rainbow colors as a symbol of optimism. The compositional inclusion of the zebra silhouette is very effective, speaking of individuality of thought, a penchant for long-distance routes, a craving for nature.
Sidney - A Stray Story
Wandering Story is one of the greatest JRPGs of all time, thanks to its unique story, fantastic combat system filled with customizable weapons and a unique visual style that combines Japanese aesthetics with European architecture.
Many stray stories revolve around the "blood-sin" tattoo, a mysterious marking that can unlock the dark forces in the ruined city of Lea Monde. This tattoo is worn by the villainous prophet Sidney, and is believed to have appeared on his body at the same time as he lost his limbs as a child to illness.
The tattoo turned out to be a pretty good compromise for Sidney. To begin with, his pathetic human limbs have been replaced by metal legs and clawed hands, and tribal cross-shaped tattoos grant him the powers of levitation, teleportation, and summoning beings from another world.
Faith is a mirrored facet
"Mirror Fringe" is probably one of the underrated games of the noughties, and so is its protagonist, a courier who runs around wiping her feet. The game's heroine is unusual, stylish, and offers gamers an unforgettable and exhilarating experience. She also has unique, fashionable tattoos that feel harmonious in the futuristic world she inhabits.
But her tattoos mean much more than the futuristic fashion of the new world. The tattoo around her right eye shows the game's label, while the sleeve on her right arm is the circuit board of her mother, who tragically died during the riot.
Overall, her tattoos are subtle, small markers that signify protest to the totalitarian regime; the look is stylish, futuristic, and it also shows that she is not afraid to hide her hatred and is willing to lay down her life in the fight against oppression.
Did we miss something? Let us know in the comments what video game tattoos you love or if you have your own?
Who would a tattoo with game symbols be good for?
Both girls and guys can get a tattoo with game symbols. Masters studio "Maruha" say that it is better to choose a tattoo by its meaning, as well as relying on your character.
Tattoo with game signs will suit you if you consider yourself human:
Unconventional card and rose tattoo
One who loves adrenaline, freedom.- Positive.
- Emotional.
- Romantic.
- Traveler.
- Activist.
- Risk-taker.
- Bright.
- Extraordinary.
- Creative.
- Patient.
- Independent.
- Strong.
- Powerful.
Also the tattoo is suitable for those who:
- Wants to find harmony, balance in life, create a family.
- Wants to turn fortune in his favor.
- Not afraid to trust fate.
- Dreams of making friends, making new friends.
- Suffers any suffering. Interpretation could be religious.
- Holds a leadership position.
It does not matter what gender you are. The main thing is that the tattoo likes you and carries the meaning you want to express.
If you are 100% sure that the signs of the game tattoo will suit you, then you can apply to the tattoo parlors St. Petersburg. There you will be prompted how best to design a drawing, or familiarize yourself with some of the features that will help you create your own unique tattoo.
