The Underground Art of Prison Tattoos
Broken spoons, beard trimmer parts and other ingenious, sometimes dangerous, tools used by incarcerated body artists.
Feature | Filed 06:00 a.m. 06.07.2019
Dan Grote spent the last week of his seven-year prison term getting tattooed.
Grote, 42, a prison teacher, had promised his students that if they passed their high school equivalency exams, he’d get a tattoo of their choice on his arms.
Almost all his students passed, and by the end of the week Grote’s arms were a melange of tattoo art that included prison towers and William Blake poems. Some of the students inked Grote themselves, using tattoo machines fashioned out of CD players, pen casings and guitar strings. Other students just drew the art.
“It was our way of saying thank you to each
