This is the complete, RAW (not yet edited and augmented) transcript of e008 of the PSK Podcast, in which author Gregory Roberts is interviewed by co-host Graceann Bennett about topics and details of his True Crime / Prison memoir, Pirate Soldier King. This segment focuses on all aspects of the Ink Game in prison: Gang Tattoos, Prison Tattoos, how its done, what they symbolize… and, if the current wave of law enforcement profiling based on body art has any actual validity behind it. Enjoy.
INTRO
Graceann Bennett
All right. Welcome to another episode of Pirate Soldier King. I’m your host, Grace Ann Bennett with Gregory Roberts, Liver of the Life and Teller of the Story, Pirate Soldier King. And we are getting into it today because there’s a lot going on in the news with people being basically…
Gregory Roberts
— disappeared.
GB: —right, disappeared. This is something that I thought we didn’t do in America, but we’re disappearing people into El Salvador, into some prisons that they may never get back out of based on supposed gang affiliation, criminal activity, different things. And a lot of that comes from the tattoos and the clothing that they’re wearing as a way to identify them.
So forget the court of law — now we’re just looking at tattoos and clothing, and then we’re getting them on a plane and disappearing people. Yes, quite interesting developments happening right now. And we have Gregory Roberts, who knows a few things about tattoos, clothing, gang affiliations… and might have a perspective on this that we haven’t heard before. A perspective on what’s going on right now, and separating truth from fiction.
GR: Well, let’s get straight into it.
GB: OK, let’s get straight into it. OK, so where do we even start, Mr. Roberts?
GR: Let’s start with the New York Times article. Because I love the New York Times. It’s my daily read.
Okay, so let’s talk about the New York Times today and what’s going on.
Gregory Roberts (03:28)
Okay. So two of the things the article said is, a) there’s a profiling structure in place that has to do with clothing and who you’re photographed with and b) in a certain sense, tattoos. And yeah, I have a lot of experience with tattoos. Not only, I mean, do I have several, but…
Okay, let’s see.
<awkward pause, decides to play along>
Well, I mean, sure.
<takes off outer shirt>
Yeah, let’s do the show with tattoos showing, as many as possible. All right. Okay, there we got it. Okay. So you do have, just to show in the audience that we have, you have some knowledge of tattoos.
All right, there we have it. <spins arms to show tattoos> Yeah, yeah, most of them are family, but you might argue: gang is family to a certain, know, percent to a certain culture or parts of the population.
And so the New York Times basically said, [in the audio version of the article — strangely, not in print] “Look, this guy had a hummingbird tattoo on his neck and and a Michael Jordan Jumpman tattoo. Maybe he just loves birds and is a basketball fan.”
And I just sat there laughing: “OK, New York Times. Oh-kaay.”
Okay, lefties, yeah, maybe. It’s possible. And maybe I like to walk into banks with a ski mask on.
It doesn’t in itself make me a bank robber, but… c’mon, you can put the pieces together. And truly: I’m not saying anything about this particular individual. What I am saying, that from an objective perspective, tattoos are — obviously — a huge part of gang culture, for both street gangs and prison gangs.
It’s how you mark your affiliation. It’s how you see someone on the yard and you read them and you know which gang they’re a part of, without even having to ask.
Patches : Earned, Not Given
And there’s a deep symbolism to it, including marks that you earn. There are many tattoos that are earned, and not “given”… or earned and not just “go into your artist and say, put this design on me.” No. You have to do something to get that. You have to put in the work. Then you get recognized. Then you earn the patch.
So in order to earn those tattoos, those patches, you had to put in the work. You have to go on a mission. You have to do something on behalf of your gang that earns you the cred to get that recognition — that mark, that badge, that patch — on your body. And it’s taken really seriously. So these tattoos would not be something that you would get casually done on the streets.
And I’ll give you a perfect example. A kid came in, a young punk with a swastika on his chest. And real quick, the WhiteBoys were on him: “All right, my boy, welcome aboard!… Now, what’d you do to earn that?”
He was like, “What are you talking about? I’m a fucking Nazi.”
And they were like, “Yeah, but did you put in the work?” (meaning: did you perpetrate an act of violence against a rival race or gang)
He was like, “What do you mean?”
They’re like, “Well, son: You have to stab a black dude to get that swastika on your chest.” — That’s how it was in Southern California, at least. And they continued: “So you have two options. You can do it, or we can get that patch right off of you.”
He says, almost freaking out now: “I ain’t stabbing nobody.”
And they were like, “Well that’s just fine. We’ll take care of it for you.”
And so they took him in the cell, they took some sharp razors and they friggin’ carved that swastika right off his chest. So, I just want the audience to grasp the gravity of certain gang tattoos… certain symbols are pretty fucking serious.
Oh My God. That’s absolutely crazy.
Crazy, and real. To be clear: an experienced tattoo artist in the Free, someone with a high-end studio or something, they’re not even going to consider inking anyone with gang tattoos… that’s done internally by the gang. Because unless they’re really intimate with the gang, they don’t want any of that liability on their hands… not the bad liability, and certainly not the liability of putting a patch on a man who hadn’t earned it.
La Raza : Family
Okay, well. We get it. My God. Okay. So… so, what are the things you have to do to get the tattoos — the specific tattoos that people are being profiled for, to be deported — to be shipped out of the country?
Let me roll it back a second here. I’ll say this: when you go to any facility, any serious facility, a prison, a jail: the first thing that happens at intake is they strip you buck naked in a shower, cuff you, and they bring in a dude with a high-end Nikon DSLR camera with a macro lens on it. And that man photographs every tattoo on your body, from every angle. It’s like a dozen shots, minimum — per person. per incoming inmate.
And so, I mean, when they first did that to me, I was like, “Yo. What’s going on?” I thought the officer was some kind of perv or something, getting all up in my space, and taking all these close-up photos of my skin.
And then they were pointing at my wrist and forearm and the one officer demanded: “What gang is that?” And then they pointed right at this tattoo of my mother.
And I say, all smartass like: “Well, motherfucker, that’s my family.”
Which ends up being… almost ironic. The Hispanic gang is called — they call themselves, roughly — La Raza, which means, literally, “family.” And the more I think about it: most of these dudes don’t have dads. Many didn’t have any sort of stable home growing up. Learned to live on the streets, young. So who was their family? Not their biological parents.
It was their gang brothers, their gang sisters, and their gang leaders as father figures and the gang aunties as mommas, if they were that lucky. So maybe my “family” tattoos are closer to the reality of gang tattoos than I originally thought. Mexicans have Aztec calendar stones and Hummingbirds. I have Native American labyrinths (great great grandmother), and English coats-of-arms (my grandfather).
But yeah, so back to intake, the photos, the extensive documentation… they — the police — must have a huge archive, I would assume it’s in some digital database where they’re tagging and correlating all of it — or, you know, maybe not, given the primitivism & backwardness of the government — but it could be. Then that would be a primary data source for all this profiling, this “this tattoo equals this gang affiliation” leap.
JumpMan & Hummingbirds
Mm-hmm. Moving along. New York Times said that one man had both a hummingbird on his neck, and a Michael Jordan Nike logo. So what does it mean to have a “Jordan Jumpman” on your body. In a prison or gang tattoos context?
Well, maybe it means you’re fan of Michael Jordan.
“You Jump,
I Jump.”
Okay.
Or maybe… perhaps it means that when your car jumps, when your gang jumps, you jump with them. Like in every situation, you have the option: Are you going to fight or flight? So Jumpman? You jump, I jump. That’s something that we say.
It’s a bit like Ride or Die. It basically means: “I am ready to jump into the fray at a moment’s notice.” As in: “I’ll do it with the excellence and competence of Michael Jordan. Shit goes down? I will jump right the fuck in. Zero hesitation. Let’s roll.”
The most common place I saw the Jordan tattoo was on a cheek… or right here on the neck. But essentially, some place where it’s right out front, like a warning sign to everybody: I’m a fucking special forces soldier. I’m not someone you want to fuck with.
And what about the hummingbird?
I don’t have a tremendous amount of personal experience with the hummingbird.
And this is the curious part. When they mentioned it in the New York Times, they said “a hummingbird on his neck.” Now I don’t know about you, but I’m thinking of, like — like Audobon drawings of a hummingbird: a beautiful, colorful, well-sketched piece of pretty art.
As soon as I Googled it, it was all Aztec designs. And the hummingbird is in fact the symbol or the logo of the Aztec god of war.
And so it’s… it would appear — allegedly — to possibly represent a soldier of the of El Eme (the M) or Mexican Mafia. It used to be a butterfly and the butterfly kind of got busted — played out, too noticeable — so now perhaps it’s a hummingbird — but again, maybe he does just like birds — you know, it’s a total possibility.
Hmm, okay. Right. And so when you were in prison, what were the gang tattoos — and the “normal” tattoos, that you saw, and what were some of the ones you talked about… well, what was the general culture around tattoos in prison?
Well, I mean, so in prison, a lot of it comes down to: how do you pass the time?
And a great way to pass the time is to just get tattoos. You have the time, and they’re much less expensive than they are on the street. And honestly, some of the artists — bother the designers and the inkers, in prison, are some of the more skilled tattoo artists I’ve ever met.
Like, if you were to have a full sleeve or a full back tattoo done out in the Free, that might be 12 sessions with your artist — or more, depending on the depth of color and ink and things. So that might be hard to do in the real world, scheduling all that time, and that healing and care, especially if you’re busy.
But in prison, you got time, so why not just get a full back tattoo? Why not get a full sleeve? Why not? And I mean, you can see, like, I would say prisoners definitely have far more tattoos than the general population. Like in terms of total body ink coverage, I may be at the upper 10% of the free world population… but in prison? Ha! I was in the lower 10%. I was a tattoo lightweight.
And it’s…
How do you tattoo in prison?
But how do they even do that? I mean, you don’t have the machines, you don’t have, like, how do you keep it clean? How do you even get the ink? Like, how do you actually get a tattoo in prison? It’s not like they have a tattoo parlor there. So how does that actually work?
Well, let’s start with like jail tattoos, because that’s how I started my career as a tattoo artist.
“You can draw, you can tattoo.
It’s just like drawing —
but with a needle, not a pen.
on my skin, not paper.”
So I had a friend, my celly, and he saw my art — because I like to draw. And he was like, “Oh, my God, dude, you’re going to give me a tattoo!”
I was like, “Dude: I don’t know anything about giving tattoos.”
He’s like, “Oh my god. you can draw, you can tattoo. It’s just like drawing — but with a needle, not a pen. on my skin, not paper.”
So I’m like, “Well, this sounds like a new adventure. Why the fuck not? I’ll give it a shot.” And I said what you said, like, “Fine. I’ll do it. But where are we going to get the ink? The tattoo gun?”
He’s like, “Don’t worry, I’m going to make it all. All you gotta do it put it on me.”
Okay. okay.
Making the Needles & Tattoo Ink
So again, this was in jail, much more limited resources than prison, but he took one of our pencils and we made some string from the sheets. And then we got some staples just from like forms and things and sharpened the staples for like half an hour each. So they’re like needles and broke the pencil in half, stuck the needles into the pencil, tied it with the string. And that was our tattoo gun.
for hand pick work. So it’s like just hammering these needles into his face and neck.
But the ink??
So we got from commissary, we got a hold of some Vaseline and lit it on fire. That’s a whole other thing, but you can make fire in cells. It’s not that hard as long as you have a battery.
And so we lit the Vaseline on fire and put it under a paper bag, upside down — like our lunch bag on top of it, and so the smoke rises and it puts pure carbon on the lid of the paper bag. And you scrape that off with your razor, that’s pure carbon black, and you mix it with like a little bit of soap, and a drop or two of water, and… boom! There’s your ink.
Whoa. That’s crazy.
Gregory Roberts (11:11)
Yeah, it is crazy! And that’s how we do it. So now I’m thinking I’m gonna do something on his arm, something standard… and the first thing he asked me for is: “Okay, I want a Nordic rune for Thor, right here at the corner of my eye.”
I was like, “Oooooooh man, this is sketch.” Like, you know, I’m just gonna be here <gestures repeatedly slamming a needle into a man’s face>.
But he’s not relenting. He’s like, “Come on, do it, motherfucker. Don’t be a chickenshit. Give me the fucking ink!” So I just like, you know, pegged his skull right up against the wall, held him still, like with my hand. And I went, just stabbing him, again and again and again, right by the eye, you know, until I had the rune carved into his face. Took about, I don’t know, 20 minutes or so, for that first hand-pick. I kept having to go over it again and again to get that soapy ink to take.
Whoa.
Hugin & Munin
–and — thank god — he was happy with the work. So over the next month, you know, I basically did his entire — he was bald, head shaved clean like most of us were — I did his entire head: the sides, top, back — and then on both sides of his neck I inked Hugin and Munin — the Ravens of Odin.
Do you have a picture? I really want to see a picture of that one.
I might have a drawing of some of the art. But photos? Ha, no. This is behind bars, no cameras… however, you know what? I bet AI can make a pretty accurate render of it. Let’s see:
SORA: straight on photo of a bald man’s neck, which has fresh large handpicked tattoos of Odin’s ravens: Hugin on the left, Munin on the right. dead center above Adam’s apple is 3″ tall, very narrow old english calligraphy of “88” . man is looking up, exposing throat. harsh fluorescent lighting. jail cell out of focus in background.
Well, I’ll be damned. There it is. Boom.
That’s insane, how fucking true that is to the reality. Yeah. That’s basically the ink I did on him, more or less. My first tattoos.
Anyways. It didn’t end extremely well in that cell. There’s no photographs obviously, but yeah, I did really good work on him. I did a great job for sure. And it was amazing.
Suddenly, I was a tattoo artist. And my first artwork was a full face, neck and head. I felt liberated, artistically… and empowered. Like, I could come out into the free, and say: “Hells yes. I’ll put that tattoo on you.”
…but he didn’t get mad at you? or it didn’t end well because you tattooed him.
No, no, no he didn’t. No, I mean he was really pleased with the tattoos. When we finally fought, it was about all kinds of other bullshit. Not the tattoo. But now that you mention it… me stabbing him with a razor sharp pencil in the eye, neck, cheek and skull for hours on end, almost an hour a day for a whole month? Yeah. Yeah… maybe that pissed him off a little bit.
Gregoreite
And then you have a tattoo that you got in prison, too, right?
Yes, I do.
Let me see.
That whole thing? Wow.
That whole thing right there, yeah, yeah.
That, <repositions arm for camera> there we go, it’s a little better.
Graceann Bennett (12:51)
Whoa. huh. And what does that say?
So that actually is a Bible verse — or rather, the keyword from one of my favorite verses. It says gregoreite in a very highly stylized Greek — the language the original gospel was written in — which I designed to match my other ink. Gregoreite is from Mark 13:32, where the disciples asked Jesus: “Hey, Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus, that’s great. Now: Where is it, and when is it coming?”
And he just says, “Well, know, first of all, I don’t even know. Only God knows, but I’ll tell you this: it’s gonna come quick and quiet and fast and hard. So keep vigilant, or you’re gonna miss it. So don’t look to the left, don’t look to the right, don’t look up, don’t look down. Just be aware of what’s going on, be vigilant and… watch.”
And that word, in the original Greek: “watch,” and also “be vigilant” is: “gregorité”, which happens to be my name — or rather the ancient phonetic origin of my name. So it felt right to get that particular word, that mark, as a record of my time.
Okay, very cool. But if you… you wouldn’t be deported based on your tattoos, right? You don’t have anything that’s on the list of questionable gang tattoos…?
Gregory Roberts (14:00)
Not that they can read.
.
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