Wait, actually, that’s not the really sad part. The really sad part is that, even after going through with it and getting the tat, Baldwin never did get a chance to appear on Hannah Montana.
Soviet Prisoners Got Pictures of Lenin and Stalin
In the middle of the 20th century, Soviet prisoners had this whole system of tattooing, where common motifs represented various parts of the criminal world. A skull, predictably, boasted of a murder, while a cat represented thievery. A dragon told people that you fought against the state and communism. A crown meant you were a boss.
via Wiki Commons
Then came the Bitch Wars. We don’t have much to say about them, but we really wanted to inform you that Soviet prisons had something called the Bitch Wars, in which many prisoners changed their tattoos. “Bitch” here referred not to what we now call “prison bitches” but to state collaborators, which included snitches and even anyone who worked in the gulag when forced to. During the Bitch Wars, a thief with a dagger might add an arrow, which represented his fight against bitches, while bitches saw their criminal rank change and received forced tattoos marking them.
Throughout this time, some prisoners got big tattoos of Lenin or Stalin. This was sad not just because Lenin and Stalin were horrible, but because of the motives behind these tattoos. The prisoners got them not out of misplaced admiration but in hopes that this would save them from beatings, as guards would not want to denigrate these images.