Operating Quietly, Tattoo Artists Make Their Mark in Iraq

(Naseer Nouri - Ftwp)

"I didn't only have an eagle drawn on my back, I also went to a fitness and weightlifting course, and also boxing, to build up my body and be impressive," he said. "Because many of the Iraqi girls do not like skinny and poor guys, or weak ones, so for me I consider it a symbol of strength and my personality."

On the walls of the cramped tattoo parlor in downtown Baghdad, hundreds of slips of paper show possible designs: a flaming skull, the "Metallica" logo and the city's most pervasive architectural flourish, the coil of razor wire. The designs are drawn by Sadiq Salman, 29, whose more ambitious work includes an eight-foot-tall coffin sculpture containing an infant constructed entirely of cigarette butts.

Some days, there is a line in the hallway as Iraqis -- government bureaucrats, students, soldiers, policemen -- wait to go under the buzzing stylus.

"They don't want something beautiful like a rose or a girl," said Salman, less concerned about anonymity than the artist who owned the shop. "Most of the people now have sadistic ideas. They don't love roses or nature, because the atmosphere here encourages an angry mentality."

As for the artists in the war zone, "we are all surrealists now," he said.

Growing up in Baghdad, Jafr Rahdi, 29, admired his mother's facial tattoos, a series of colored dots running along her chin and eyebrows, a decoration that has fallen from favor among younger Iraqi women. When he was imprisoned under Hussein for deserting the Iraqi army, Rahdi, a Shiite, tattooed a snake on his left shoulder with a needle. Across his chest, he pricked out the letters: "When will tears smile?"

Fearing beatings or torture, fellow inmates tattooed Hussein's face on their bodies, believing no one would touch the image of the dictator, he said, while others wrote on themselves: "We all pay allegiance to you, Saddam."

After the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, Rahdi wanted to apply for a job as a police officer with the Interior Ministry, but he learned that during the initial strip search, those with tattoos were weeded out. So he injected painkillers into his arm, heated an iron and seared off his snake.

"You could smell the flesh burning," he said.

He got the job.

His friend, Mortada Ali, tattooed a forked sword on his right forearm while living abroad in Lebanon. The image depicts the sword of Imam Ali, a cousin and son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad, and is a dead giveaway that Mortada Ali is a Shiite.

"Because of this tattoo, if I drive through a Sunni area I will be killed," he said.