Siberian Education by Nicolai Lilin Page A

criminal is about forty or fifty years old. You will never see young people with large, complete tattoos in the Siberian criminal community, as you do in other communities.
    To be able to read bodies decorated with such complex tattoos you need a lot of experience and to know the tattooing tradition perfectly. As a result the figure of the tattooist has a special place within the Siberian criminal community: he is like a priest, trusted by everyone to act on their behalf.
    As a child I was intrigued by this tradition, but I didn’t know much about it – only what my grandfather, my father and my uncle had told me. I was interested in the idea of being able to read everything that was written on their bodies.
    So I spent a long time copying the tattoos which I saw around me, and the more I copied them the more I despaired, because I couldn’t find one tattoo that was the same as another. The main subjects recurred, but the details changed. After a while I understood that the secret must lie in the details, so I began to analyse them: but it was like trying to learn a foreign language without having anyone to teach you. I had noticed that certain images were placed on some parts of the body but not on others. I tried to make connections between the images, venturing hypotheses, but the details felt elusive, like sand that slipped through my fingers.
    When I was about ten I began to do fake tattoos on my friends’ arms, recreating with a biro the images I had seen on grown-up criminals. Later, neighbours started asking me to do specific drawings for them, which they would then go and have tattooed on their bodies. They would explain to me how they wanted it to look and I would reproduce it on paper. Many paid me – not much, ten roubles a time, but to me the mere fact that they paid me at all was amazing.
    In this way, without intending to, I became quite well known in the district, and the old tattooist who did all the tattoos based on the drawings that I prepared – Grandfather Lyosha – sent me his regards and his compliments now and then, through different people. I was pleased: it made me feel important.
    On my twelfth birthday, my father had a serious talk with me: he told me I was old enough and must think about what I wanted to do with my life, so that I could break away from my parents and become independent. Many of my friends had already done a bit of smuggling under the guidance of the adults, and I too had made a number of trips with my Uncle Sergey, crossing the border repeatedly with gold in my rucksack.
    I replied that I wanted to learn the tattooist’s trade.
    A few days later my father sent me to Grandfather Lyosha’s house to ask him if he would take me on as his apprentice. Grandfather Lyosha gave me a warm welcome, offered me some tea, leafed through my drawing-book and examined the tattoos that I’d done on myself.
    â€˜Congratulations! You’ve got a “cold hand”,’ he commented. ‘Why do you want to be a tattooist?’
    â€˜I like drawing, and I want to learn our tradition; I want to understand how to read tattoos . . .’
    He laughed, then he got up and went out of the room. When he came back he was holding a tattooing needle in his hands.
    â€˜Look at this carefully: this is what I tattoo honest people with. It’s this needle that has won me the respect of many and earned me my humble bread. It’s because of this needle that I have spent half my life in prison, tormented by the cops; throughout my life I have never succeeded in possessing anything except this needle. Go home and think about it. If you really want to lead this life, come back to me: I’ll teach you all I know about the trade.’
    I thought about it all night. I didn’t like the idea of spending half my life in prison and being tortured by the cops, but given that the alternatives that lay ahead promised more or less the same, I decided to give it a