Yard yarns, hepatitis C and the dice roll of prison tattoos

Photo courtesy: Unsplash.

Soon after Brad* entered Cessnock Correctional Centre in the Hunter Valley in 2019, COVID-19 lockdowns swamped the globe. Inside Australia’s prison system, authorities limited visitations from friends, families and even lawyers. The use of solitary confinement sky-rocketed. Smuggling operations became scarcer. Even the letters inmates received were all photocopies. Days blurred into each other, melting at the edges and coagulating like a sticky paste. Sporadic flashes of violence and frustration amid the grey drabness became markers of time. One day, there were cell fires at Cessnock jail as inmates vented their fury. A few months later, in July 2020, a full-blown riot broke out.

“The jail economy went a bit nuts during this period,” Brad explains.

Throughout this time, Brad’s cellmate turned his body into a canvas, often tattooing himself through the night. It was never a quick process. His cellmate was methodical, his lines intricate. Almost anybody with a tattoo knows there’s a meditative pain to tattooing, a therapeutic release. It’s the perfect antidote to the storm clouds of depression, and to a distinct shortage of drugs inside a prison.

One day, Brad threw out a hectically mouldy loaf of bread from his cell fridge. It had been sitting there for weeks. Hidden inside that loaf of bread was his cellmate’s DIY tattoo gun.

Brad had no idea.

His cellmate was irate. He demanded Brad pay him 500 bucks to replace his tattoo gun.

Brad never paid up and nothing ultimately came of it, but this story of high-quality jail tattooing is not an image outsiders often associate with prison time.

On the outside, most are well aware there’s no better visual marker of current generational change than tattoos. By sheer force of volume, tattoos are becoming more and more socially acceptable. That faded blue outline of a dog on your neck generally won’t prevent you finding employment these days. What’s more: shit tatts are trendy and it seems like every man and his dog in Australia is a backyard tattooist these days. But there’s a particular kind of DIY tattooing rising in popularity that comes with substantial risk: prison tattooing.

It’s an age-old tradition. Some consider a jail tatt a right of passage. Some get one to prove their gang affiliation. Some just want to cure boredom. For others it can be an act of rebellion within a system that seeks to obliterate individuality. Either way, it’s certainly one way to give a middle finger salute to the screws.

According to a government report from 2022, roughly 1 in 14 people get a tattoo or body piercing during a stint in an Australian jail, and tattoos tend to be much more popular than piercings. For people aged between 18 and 24, this percentage rises to just over 1 in 5 (22%). That said, it’s hard to find accurate data and it’s very possible the number is even higher. Other studies suggest the proportion of Australian inmates getting tattooed inside (not piercings) sits around 40%.

Far from a dying art, jail tattooing is spreading in popularity. This isn’t the domain of old-school crims. Jayden*, who has spent roughly 17 years in jails across Victoria and NSW, tells No Filter that getting tattooed in jail is even more common today than when he first entered the prison pipeline.

But is it being done safely?

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A half sleeve tattoo snakes down Raf’s left arm from the top of his shoulder to his elbow. Halfway across his arm the tattoo becomes only an outline because the bloke who tattooed him in jail over 20 years ago ran out of ink halfway through. Raf* has never bothered to get it finished.

Locked up at the age of 18 in an adult prison in the late 90s, Raf first encountered tattooing. Men around him were sporting fresh ink every day, so he paid a bikie from the Nomads to teach him how to make a DIY tattoo gun. Like a cicada camouflaged against a tree trunk, evading the vision of swooping birds, spiders and wasps, these tattoos were designed to make him less visible to prey. Raf simply wanted to fit in with the boys. These days, he has mixed feelings towards this decision.                       

A jail tattoo on Raf’s arm. Sections of the tattoo have not been filled in with ink because the tattooist, at the time, ran out of ink.

Photo courtesy: anonymous.

Raf believes he got hepatitis C, a blood-borne virus, while locked up from a jail tattoo he did on himself. He used his own clean needle and he firmly believes he got the virus from specks of blood on the barrel of the DIY tattoo gun (the casing of a pen) which he borrowed from the man who taught him how to build the contraption. That teacher was a well-known jail tattooist. So you’d think he’d know how to maintain safe sterile equipment, right?

Yes and no. In short: tattooing on the inside is risky business.

First of all, hep C is really common in jails. Blood-borne viruses, such as hepatitis C and HIV/AIDS, are passed on through blood-to-blood contact. Needles are a key way that these illnesses spread, so they’re often associated with injecting drug use. But reused needles in cosmetic surgeries can also spread them. And unclean tattoo needles. (Authorities have mostly eradicated AIDS in Australian jails but hep C remains rife. It’s a really serious health issue. If left untreated, hep C can lead to chronic ill-health and life-threatening conditions such as liver cancer and sclerosis.)

Jail tattooists work in secrecy because the practice isn’t legal. It means prison tattooing carries the same health risks as injecting drugs inside.

The exchange and reuse of handmade injecting and tattoo equipment is rife in prisons, so you’re more likely to encounter unsanitary equipment and reused fits (needles) in a jail cell than in a licensed tattoo parlour. Media reports from the US indicate that incarcerated people across the pond are stealing used and discarded syringes from biohazard bins or buying them cheaply from medical orderlies. Australian studies suggest that similar practices occur here – one notable difference being the high price of illegal fits on the inside for those who don’t make, steal or smuggle their own needles.

High prices are a sign of lots of demand and not enough supply. While health authorities, peer educators, nurses and SAPOs are constantly rabbiting on about hep C in prisons and educating inmates, there is, regardless, a high probability of inmates reusing needles. This is a problem because the percentage of people in Australian prisons with hep C is far higher than infection rates in the general population. Moreover, the data seems to suggest that those who inject drugs are also more likely to get a prison tattoo than others. Both activities involve needles, which, if shared, can spread hep C. So, yes, there are recent documented cases of hep C coming from tattoos in Australian prisons.

Inmates will usually clean and disinfect tattoo equipment with the cleaning liquid Fincol. It’s not a fool-proof method for avoiding blood-borne viruses but it’s better than not doing anything at all and there aren’t any other choices when you’re locked up.

Blood-borne viruses are a topic you’ll hear about a tonne if you get locked up in Australia. Cheery voices will probably haunt your dreams, whispering mantras. Hep C testing is free and easy. Hep C treatment has a 97% success rate. Did you know… Health posters, brochures and pamphlets bombard inmates. Peer educators – that is, people with lived experience of incarceration and drug usage – attend correctional centres and tell inmates forthrightly to throw away used fits. Some inmates get tattoo needles from wire brush while other file down the spring from a click pen, so the advice is always to pluck a fresh one or make a new one for any underground activity. You get the idea.

Jayden, locked up most of his adult life in NSW and Victoria, suggests that education and awareness around blood-borne viruses has led to inmates tattooing in a safer way. “We’d use new ink every time, new needles every time,” he states. “We don’t use second-hand stuff anymore.”

Jail tattoos on Jayden’s legs. All his tattoos are jail work.

Photo courtesy: anonymous.

Indeed, education around blood-borne viruses does seem to be having an impact. While the predicted rate of hep C among inmates locked up in Australia sat around 20% a few years ago, recent data suggests the proportion has now dropped to roughly 8%. This comes down, in part, to safer drug use and safer tattooing practices. But the statistical improvement is also linked to the introduction of new hep C medications a few years ago, which mean that hep C is almost always curable.

Former inmate Brad suggests there’s an ironic flipside to the success of this new hep C treatment. “A very blazé attitude” persists among some inmates, Brad warns, especially among inmates who think they’ll spot the illness easily and get it cured quickly. But it’s not always the case that someone will know they have hep C immediately. The symptoms can start off really mild. For people who’ve had poor medical care their whole life, the initial symptoms can seem the same as simply being run down. In other words, their body could be storing the virus for months without them realising.

“Your general person coming off the street doing a little bit of time in jail couldn’t care less about a jail tattoo. But the guys in there for a while or the young kids especially want something to take back with them as a badge of pride,” Brad explains.

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There’s still debate about whether hepatitis C can be transferred via tattoo ink. Some researchers believe the ink partially neutralises the virus. Regardless, the main virus threat is the needle. But it’s always best practice for tattoo artists to separate ink into small containers for each new person they tattoo, rather than continually dipping into one larger container. Where tattoo ink is harder to source (in jail, for example) this becomes more of a problem.

Sourcing or creating ink in prison doesn’t make for pleasant reading. Inmates and visitors do smuggle ink and motors for DIY tattoo guns, and Jayden says corrupt correctional officers sometimes bring them into jails too. While state-based corrective services may not want to admit it, no amount of invasive strip -searching and surveillance has ever halted the flow of contraband in Australian jails.

That said, tattoo supplies are usually not at the top of the list of priorities for smuggling and the methods for making ink aren’t exactly sanitary. Inmates sometimes use pen ink but it’s more common for them to create soot by burning down aluminium dinner trays, match sticks or tobacco, essentially whatever they can find and burn down into ashes. Burning down the rubber souls of shoes and sandals and mixing the remnants with water also makes primo jail ink, apparently.

Corrective Services NSW banned lighters and tobacco in NSW jails a few years back (RIP White Ox) but it’s made no impact whatsoever on the ability of inmates to create fire, and therefore jail ink. Inmates will usually make a candle from their weekly ration of butter or margarine inside a drink can that’s cut in half. They’ll stick a wick in it, which is usually a piece of toilet paper twisted up like a pretzel, light it and place the other half of the can on top with just enough air for the candle to continually burn.

Here’s Jayden describing the process:

“Sometimes we’d make a flame from a wick. We’d get a string and try and dry it out and soak it in olive oil. We’d light it on fire and put a tin on top of it so it catches the black smoke from the flame. This is soot. You scrape the black smoke off the bottom of the tin and you mix it with toothpaste.”

All the former inmates No Filter consulted for this article – there were 4 of them – said that using DIY tattoo guns are far more common than the more primitive stick-and-poke style of tattooing. If you haven’t been locked up, you may be surprised. But anyone unlucky enough to be tossed into prison knows that inmates are always a resourceful bunch. Case in point: you can track technological advancement by paying attention to the materials used to make the DIY guns. A motor from a cassette tape, a motor from a Sony Walkman CD player, a motor from a clock, a motor from an electric toothbrush…

Moreover, convicts don’t always work freehand.

Brad, whose mother, an artist, sent him art supplies when he first entered Cessnock Correctional Centre in 2019, says that inmates used the tracing paper he had for tattoo stencils. With a piece of paper and a sketch or magazine cut-out laid over a TV, which functioned as a backlight, they’d trace their design. They’d then lather the body part in question in shaving cream and press the paper over it. The shaving cream would help the ink absorb into the skin.

“You don’t get full-blown images but you get basic tattoo construction lines from this method,” Brad explains.

What’s the takeaway point from all this?

Well, the idea of prohibition in prison is like a stark naked man running down the middle of the street, screeching at the top of his voice. The concept practically tackles you onto the sidewalk. Once you see the farce – and you quickly do – you can’t look away. It’s a sight to behold.**

Put simply: jails are like a glowing neon sign advertising that prohibition doesn’t work. Inmates will get away with anything they can.

Some will thieve, barter and bash their way to a promised land of drug-induced bliss, which is a comment not on their character but the character of the system. Sure, there is a lot of solidarity between cellmates, between gang members, but that solidarity is constantly under assault. With so many marginalised identities tossed together into pens like farmyard animals with little room to breathe, sketchy behaviour ends up hurtling towards other inmates like prize bulls on a rampage as much as towards the screws.

If you want better rights, you riot. If you want to make a political statement, you go on a hunger strike. If you want to simply make any kind of statement, you swallow something not fit for human consumption. If you want to feel safer, you make a shiv. If you want gear, you tell someone to smuggle it in or you make something worth trading for it.

A curious by-product of this struggle is that it breeds ingenuity.

“It’s like a microcosm of society,” Raf tells No Filter in an ocker old-school earcher accent reminiscent of Jisoe. “Everything is a currency.”

Raf worked in the kitchen while locked up, a highly sought-after position because it gives inmates access to a wide range of implements and commodities. He recounts slinging meat to bodybuilders and cooking up “homebrew” alcohol, aka “pruno”, in the kitchen.

“It’s like a science experiment,” he says gleefully, reminiscing about his jailhouse brews. “After a week, it ferments and starts to bubble. It’s mad. It’s like it’s alive.”

There’s even sometimes wealth to be found in the prison system for those who have an especially entrepreneurial spirit and the muscle to mark their territory. In a fascinating ABC podcast, Mahmood Fazal, a former sergeant-at-arms for the Mongols bikie club turned journalist, has explored the place of buprenorphine or “bupe” in the Victorian prison system during the COVID-19 pandemic, an opioid treatment medication designed to help people with heroin withdrawals. Emphasising the high value of bupe on the inside, Fazal cites cases of people returning to jail specifically to sell bupe strips and making serious bank, more than they could ever dream of on the outside. It’s such a serious issue that prison authorities across Australia are now trying to shift inmates onto a new form of long-acting buprenorphine which is neither tradable nor commodifiable, nor available as a take-away.  

Prohibition is such a failure that many feel the jig is up and we may as well come out in the open about illegal jail practises. Case in point: a coalition of Australian health experts and harm reduction workers have long demanded the introduction of needle exchanges, which distribute clean equipment, inside Australian jails. These advocates suggests this is the only way the NSW government will reach its target of eradicating hepatitis C by 2028. It’s a difficult pill for prison authorities and the public to swallow but one that is vital if the government is serious about eradicating blood-borne viruses. That’s simply a fact.

People have floated the idea of encouraging safer tattoo practices in Australian jails, especially in the 00s, in a similar manner to needle exchanges on the inside. But the idea seems to have died away in recent years, mainly because there’s no guarantee that introducing safe tattooing rooms, professional tattoo services or vocational tattoo training for inmates will eradicate a practice centred on defying authority. The appeal of a jail tatt feeds off its illicit nature. Moreover, what happens if an inmate strolls into a regulated tattoo space wanting a tear drop tatt or the three dots representing bikie gang affiliation (which means “la vida loca”/my crazy life)?

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Those who fiend a jail tattoo are really rolling the dice with health issues.

“My mates ask me if I got a jail tattoo,” Brad says. “Fuck no! Literally the guy tattooing you has yellow eyes. There are no white left in his eyes. This guy has jaundice, his liver failed a long time ago and he’s on his third round of hep C medication. Don’t get a tattoo from him!”

“If you have a good needle, you can do some good tattooing,” Brad continues. “But most of the time the needles are shit, blunt, bent or recycled. You can’t trust the equipment, you can’t trust the tattooist, the prison economy is shit and who are you going to call when someone does a shit tattoo on you?”

Poor quality ink and bodgy needles can cause skin infections and keloids, which are raised scars where the body has struggled to heal properly. A lot of jail tattoos end up looking rancid, at least in the short-term, and experienced tattoo artists in jail are scarce.

But there are some who take a lot of pride in their work. Jayden, for example, has a real passion for DIY tattoo cultures that comes from his background as a graffiti artist. Jail tatts cover his whole body – his arms, his legs, his back, you name it. He says it’s normal for people to mistakenly believe his tattoos were done on the outside.

A jail tattoo on Jayden’s arm.

Photo courtesy: anonymous.

Some people never shake off their prison days once they taste freedom, and there’s plenty of others who intentionally commit crimes because they feel safer in prison, they can make better money in prison or they simply believe they deserve punishment as a result of unmanaged mental illness.

Jayden may not fall into those latter categories, as far as I’m aware. But now he’s out of prison, he only uses jail-style homemade tattoo guns when he tattoos, he tells No Filter casually.

Some habits are hard to break.

Prison terms and slang: A short dictionary

Gear – Drugs. Any kind.

Fits – Needles, aka sharps. Useful for all sorts of things.

SAPOs – Services and Programs Officers for jail authorities. Usually decent enough people.

Screws – Prison guards. Bottom-feeders on the same tier as transport cops and parking inspectors.

Shiv - jail-made

* Names changed to protect privacy.

** Disclaimer: I have no incarceration experience but my daytime job does involve interviewing former inmates regularly. I’m publications coordinator at the NSW Users and AIDS Association (NUAA) lad.