Robert Jones

In the fall of 1991, two German tourists were hiking in the Ötztal Alps. Just inside the Italian border with Austria, they found a human body lying face down, frozen below its trunk in glacier ice. Since other corpses had recently been found in the area, the body was initially believed to have met its end relatively recently. Examination, however, revealed that the body was a natural mummy of a man who had lived some 5,300 years ago. Items in his possession delighted scientists with the peek they gave them into Early-Bronze-Age Europeans. A fair amount of publicity attended the discovery and its aftermath, and you might have seen his nickname (Ötzi the Iceman) mentioned in newspapers and magazines.

The reason Ötzi has been mentioned here is to demonstrate that tattooing is not a relatively recent art. Carbon tattoos made using injected soot were found in the form of short, parallel lines along Ötzi’s lower spine. A cross-shaped mark was found behind his right knee, and additional marks were found around his wrists and ankles. A theory has been advanced that the marks might be the results of an early form of acupressure or acupuncture. If that is true, it would place the use of such treatments some 2,000 years prior to their first known use in China, Egypt and other countries. Whether Ötzi’s marks are tattoos or not, though, there is evidence that tattoos predate them. Instruments apparently used for tattooing dating back as far as 10,000 to 38,000 BC have been found in Europe, and stone figures found with them bear apparent representations of tattooing.

In the recent past, tattooing was commonly thought to be used mostly by sailors, prisoners and members of motorcycle and street gangs. Modern times, however, find tattooing to be increasing in widespread social acceptance and popularity, especially among young persons. In fact, a 2006 study reported that more than a third of all Americans between 18 and 29 years of age have at least one tattoo.

Most of us probably don’t think of tattoos in terms of forensics, but the examination of tattoos (which are physiological biometric characteristics) has found increasing application in the field of forensics. Tattoos can play an important role in an investigation when fingerprints (which are primary biometric characteristics) are not available or are corrupted. An example would be where a severely burned body has no usable fingerprints. Tattoos are embedded deeply enough in skin that they can often survive severe burns. Many victims of the 9/11 attack were identified using tattoos.

Tattoos also often provide useful information about their owners in addition to their identities. This might include their religion, their fraternity, their past military affiliations, their girlfriend’s name, etc. With respect to religion, for example, it is likely that a fish or crucifix symbol would be worn by a Christian, a rosary by a Catholic, a hexagon by a believer in the occult, and a “666″ by a satanist or some members of the Aryon Brotherhood. Other tattoos can indicate wearers’ sexual orientations and even their mental states.

Tattoos are often used to assist in the identification of criminals and their victims, some of whom might also be criminals. Tattoos have been used by some criminals, for example, to indicate their gang affiliation, their gang’s territory, their previous convictions, their jail time served – even the fact that they have killed someone while in prison.

As one can imagine, a search of thousands of accumulated tattoos on file to find a match could be a slow, if not impossible, task. Even though many previous tattoo databases were computerized, both their descriptions and search functions were text based; and their descriptions, provided by humans, suffered from inconsistencies. To solve this problem, a software program, TattooID, was developed at Michigan State University. It operates in a manner similar to that of computerized fingerprint matching. Both identify distinctive image features (keypoints) where, for example, color changes or where there are boundaries between different portions of an image. The program then compares the identified keypoints to those of images stored in law enforcement databases and identifies those that most closely match. The computerized process eliminates problems generated by a text-base search due to inconsistencies introduced by human-generated descriptions.

According to an internet article, Steven Gordon, the CEO of TattooID, personally presented President Obama with a “customized, temporary safety tattoo.” It appeared to be about the size of a credit card, and it bore the following words:

My name is: B.O.
If I’m lost, please call:
The White House

ADDITIONAL FACTS:

Among Ötzi’s possessions was a copper axe. As mentioned in the leading paragraph, his body is believed to be 5,300 years old. Prior to the discovery of Ötzi’s body, however, archaeologists believed that copper had not been discovered for another thousand years. They had to revise the date just a bit.

If any of you readers visit Bolzano, Italy, you can view the body and its possessions in Ötzi’s present home in the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology.

The TattooID program can also be used to track graffiti and compare gang symbols. The FBI is also reportedly enlarging its Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) to include databases for not only tattoos, but also for mug shots, scars, iris scans and other biometric characteristics. The new system is known as Next Generation Identification.

Eight standard, major classes into which tattoos have been categorized to facilitate searching are human, animal, plant, flag, object, abstract, symbol and other.

The development by Michigan State University of the TattooID program was financed by the FBI. Seed funding for the project was provided by the U.S. Army Research Office and the National Science Foundation Center for Identification Technology Research.