Check out the work of WASTED RITA, a freelance graphic designer from Porto.
This unique archive documents Russian criminals' tattoos and their coded meanings. Included in the collection are more than three thousand tattoo drawings made by Danzig Baldaev during his time as a prison guard between 1948 and 1986. Tattoos were his gateway into a secret world in which he acted as ethnographer, recording the rituals of a closed society. The icons and tribal languages he documented are artful, distasteful, sexually explicit and provocative, reflecting as they do the lives and traditions of convicts.
View Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia Volume I, Volume II, Volume III
16 photographs by Sergei Vasiliev (edition of 8 + 2 APs) are available to buy.
Growing up as a healthy young Dutch boy, Stefan Glerum (Amsterdam, 1983) developed an interest in old paper, second hand records and extremely large trousers.
To give shape to these fascinations Glerum started to work as an assistent to Dutch master of the clear line Joost Swarte. Glerum studied illustration at the Academy St. Joost and now works as a freelance illustrator and designer, based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
some nice (tattoo) illustrations..
http://adamants.wordpress.com/
Trochilus colubris; Heliactinus cornutus; Topaza pella; Lophornis ornata; Sparganura sappho; Docimastes ensifer; Eutoxeres condamini; Lophornis gouldii; Ornismya petasphora; Augastes lumachellus; Hylocharis stokesii; Steganura underwoodii
Chamaeleon montium; Lophyrus tigrinus; Draconellus volans; Phrynosoma cornutum; Ptychozoon homalocephalum; Basiliscus americanus; Chlamydosaurus kingii; Moloch horrigus
