According to graphic designer Nikola Prijic, Bill Skarsgård himself submitted an excerpt from an H.P. Lovecraft poem titled “Despair” — a fitting match in all sorts of ways for 2024’s “The Crow” — as something his character Eric might have tattooed on his body. 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 custom stencil version that could be applied to Skarsgård’s back while shooting the Rupert Sanders film.
It’s always interesting when there’s a big fake tattoo plastered across an actor’s back like a billboard because, in practice, it ends up functioning like a billboard for a film protagonist’s characterization. Cultural assumptions about tattoos may not be as myriad as the different art styles people can apply to skin, but tattoos are a quick visual shortcut to signal that characters are edgy and non-conformist, ex-military or mafia, tormented and artistic, and often all of the above.
It’s an idea that art historian Matt Lodder has called “overdetermination” and that his colleague Nikki Sullivan terms “dermal diagnosis” — the idea that your tattoos reveal something about your inner truth or visually represent core pieces of your identity. The assumption has its roots in the work of 19th-century criminologists trying to find physical manifestations of criminal urges (with extremely mixed, racist results). But it exists in its most rigid form in movies and TV shows that want to hammer home to the audience that a character is more hardened, traumatized, or somehow extraordinary compared to corporate suits working office 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 told 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” wants to create that impression in a couple of different ways. Prijic cited Lil Wayne specifically as a visual reference for Eric’s more ornate tattoos, but he also wanted the number of tattoos to have a quality all their own. “He has a lot of shitty homemade, you know, ‘me and my friends are high and drunk’ tattoos,” Prijic said. “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.”
Those layers act as a visual shorthand for the years the movie skips over between a traumatic incident in Eric’s childhood and the events of the film proper. But both the basic and the more ornate tattoos gesture towards that East L.A. style, which itself is influenced by jailhouse tattooing and the photorealistic style of the artists at a shop called Good Time Charlie’s — now TattooLand — using iconography resonant with Chicano culture. “There’s a real particular kind of look of that style,” Lodder said.
Shorthand is just that, of course. It can never wholly stand in for good characterization through other storytelling devices — how a character is framed, how they’re dressed, how they move and emote, what choices they make, and if the movie makes those choices meaningful. Leaning too heavily on tattoos to tell a character’s story perpetuates the wrong, incomplete assumptions and stereotypes that, admittedly, make tattoos so useful to movies in 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 said. “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.”
Whatever contemporary behaviors and assumptions are present in the act of tattooing, the process for film-ready tattoos has become a lot more streamlined in recent years. “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 said. “The trick is to make them look realistic once they’re applied and not just on the computer.”
They can still look awful, of course, but with more advanced, accessible stencil-printing technology, it takes a particular set of creative wrong turns or deadline-pressured decisions to make tattoos look as bad as they sometimes do in older movies, where tattoos were painted onto skin. “The technology for that is getting a lot better than it used to,” Lodder said. “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” certainly doesn’t suffer from a lack of bleeding, and the graphic design team and makeup team worked together to make one particular tattoo application look as painful physically as 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 said.
The copyright implications of tattoos on film and TV now have clearer directives than previously, too. For a long time, whether tattoos could be shown without licensing was a nebulous question, with particular cases of potential infringement being settled out of court. Maybe the most famous example is the tattoo artist who created Mike Tyson’s facial tattoos and did not consent to have them used in the second “The Hangover” movie; but the artist behind Rasheed Wallace’s tattoo was shocked that his work was animated as part of a Nike ad, and Randy Orton’s tattoos were broken out as a customizable option for characters in the video game “WWE 2K,” something for which tattoo artist Catherine Alexander won 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 said. “Producers now have a bit more clarity about where the lines are.”
That clarity is part of why shows like “The Bear” use makeup to hide Jeremy Allen White’s actual tattoo in favor of bespoke ones. “The Crow” likewise uses designs created specifically for the film by Prijic and a couple tattoo artists, as well as basic tattoo designs that came ready-licensed from stock libraries.
The process was very collaborative with Skarsgård, who, in addition to the H.P. Lovecraft quote, asked for a zip code for a neighborhood in Sweden as a tattoo. It has nothing to do with Eric (who likely goes to the Afterlife before he leaves the United States), but it is this tiny bit of meaning encoded in a movie tattoo.
