On June 26, 2010, an anonymous man jumped from a bridge onto the tracks near North Acton Railway Station. The man aged between 30 and 50 years old had many distinctive tattoos including a shaded red and orange dragon on the right side of his chest and a green and yellow dragon on his left. On his arm, he had been inked with various tribal designs and on his back, a red-winged eagle and green shaded dog breathed fire. The “North Acton Man” had to have spent hours and hundreds in tattoo studios – but he has never been identified.
The next year, on January 10, 2011, the body of a young Asian man was found on shore at Ballast Quay, Greenwich. The name “Kamal” was tattooed on his upper right arm and a set of three numbers on the back of his right hand. The UK Missing Persons Unit officially reported the numbers to be 9 8 4, often believed to be an angel number for ‘seeking your soul’s destiny.’ Clearly “Kamal’s” tattoo art had a personal meaning to him in both name and number, so why do we still not know who he is?
In the Metropolitan Police jurisdiction alone, there are 232 outstanding cases demanding police attention. Therefore, identifying unidentified bodies is a complicated process that lacks a cohesive structure to best use physical evidence beyond DNA. Here, we asked the experts what more can be done to identify bodies using the history and trends of tattoos:
Adam McDade
Adam McDade is a tattooist, illustrator, researcher and lecturer in Design at the University of Sunderland. His PhD thesis titled, ‘Beyond the Epidermis: A practical investigation into contemporary western tattooing’, was ‘the first piece of academic literature to utilise tattooing practice as a core methodology.’
To what extent do you think personal tattoos could be used in the identification process of unidentified bodies?
I think it’s necessary to consider the scope of tattooing and think of it as a medium, rather than a phenomenon—a small tattoo on a wrist is very different to a full back piece, for example. It could also be argued that a semicolon, is very personal to the tattooee and may represent something very meaningful to them, but to a tattooist, it’s just a generic character.
As a tattooist, I can tell you that the tattoo marketplace is incredibly broad in a contemporary context across social/political/cultural demographics. Some people have canvases on their walls with ‘live laugh love’ bought from B and M or other discount home stores, some have posters from bands or films, and others have originals from contemporary artists. These all communicate different information and tattooing is comparable to this.
What can we tell from trends and the popularity of designs?
As tattooing exists within the broader visual culture in which it is situated, trends associated with tattooing can reflect whatever is happening in popular culture at the time. For example, when David Beckham started getting black and grey realism in 2000, a surge in that style of tattooing proliferated. Similarly, when Rhianna got ‘Shhhh’ tattooed on her finger, tattooists began receiving a lot of requests for similar or the same work. This, and pieces like these, may be indicative of a time period, and so could be very useful in identification.
Hew Morrison
Hew Morrison works as a forensic artist reconstructing forensic imaging for facial identification. Morrison also works closely with Locate International, a UK charity helping families of unsolved missing person cases find their loved ones.
How do you think tattoos in the case of unidentified bodies could be utilised better in police investigations?
I think putting out an appeal regarding all of the UK cases where the unidentified person had tattoos would allow Locate International to create an extra blog or website and this could easily be publicised in the media to bring attention to a case.
Further to that, the created website or blog could be sent out to all of the UK registered tattoo studios and when a new case is added it could be sent as an urgent appeal to those tattooists subscribed to it.
Dave Grimstead
Dave Grimstead is the co-founder of Locate International and a senior investigating officer concerning long term missing people. During his police career, Grimstead developed as a ‘specialist investigator of domestic and child homicides, working with leading experts to develop internationally recognised cutting-edge investigations.’
Do the police value tattoos as physical evidence?
Yes, so they do look at tattoos, but there are not really any tattoo specialists that they go to for help. Again, tattoo images are not often recorded as well as we would like them to be. I know camera equipment’s getting a lot better, but we’re still not seeing great improvements in documenting images.
What can we tell about a person from their tattoos?
If you were looking at a crime, you have something called victimology. So if you’re going to find somebody or find a name for a person, understanding who they might have been and what their culture, what their background might be is important and that might come from their tattoos. People tend to go back to somebody they trust and spend a lot of money in one place. So the more that’s recorded about that, the better.
How could tattoo artists and experts be valuable to investigations?
There needs to be a way of encouraging people who work in that field to get engaged in the discussion, which I don’t think happens very much, because I think I think there are people out there in the industry who want to help out more, but probably don’t know how to do that.
Somebody might remember the way those tattoos were done. If a person died in North London, our goal is to enhance the tattoos as best we can and then try and target tattoo artists in that London specific area by trying different ways of showing those tattoos in the media.
