Iconic Video Game Ink – Part II
Garcia Hotspur – Shadows of the Damned
Demon hunter Garcia Hotspur’s tattoos make an appearance in the game’s opening scene even before his face does. Not surprisingly, the ink on the Shadows’ protagonist pertains mostly to his fight against the forces of the underworld.
He has several all-seeing eyes, skulls and demon horns splayed across his torso. What else would a badass demon slayer get? That full-back horned demon ink is not entirely unreminiscent of the Red Dragon from the film with the same name, by the way. 
The tattoo most significant for the game’s plot however is the text across the front of his neck. In uncharacteristically dainty font, Garcia has tattoed the sentence “I would kill the world before it did you harm.” As his mission is to rescue his girlfriend Paula from her demon captors, this somehow tender yet violent phrase surely relates to his wish to protect her.
Rei Kurosawa – Fatal Frame III
Definitely central to the game plot is the snake and holly vine tattoo that Fatal Frame III protagonist Rei Kurosawa wakes up with one day after a dream.
Rei is a recluse who suffers from survivor’s guilt after a car accident that killed her husband to be, Yuu. While out, she catches a glimpse of what looks like her dead fiancé and follows him into a snowy mansion. In a strange daydream, she follows him inside, consumed by grief and longing.
After meeting a tattooed woman inside, she has a vision of herself lying on the floor as a tattoo spreads across her body and four girls prepare to drive stakes through her hands and feet. When the tattoo reaches her eyes, the daydream ends.
She later dreams of the mansion again, and of being chased by the woman. The woman touches her shoulder and Rei wakes up with cursed ink. In the game, the snake pattern represents mourning and the holly spiritual pain. The curse is not unique to Rei, and the dreams and hallucinations follow the same pattern for other cursed survivors.
About 1 to 2 months following the curse, the tattoo will have spread across all of the victim’s body. They then disappear entirely, leaving only traces of ash or soot where their body was.
Agent 47 in Hitman
As the PS5 reveal event sent the internet into a flurry just yesterday, we learned that one of the games coming to the next-gen console in 2021 is the next installment in the Hitman franchise. Few minimalist tattoos are as iconic in gaming as the barcode inked onto the back of Agent 47’s head. The tattoo acts as a key to access high-security areas of the facility where Hitman was cloned and trained, but also as a form of identification.
Underneath the vertical stripes sits a series of numbers. 640509-040147, to be precise. 640509 equals YY/DD/MM of Hitman’s birth, 04 means that he is a product of series four, 01 that he is clone number one from the series, and 47 indicates that he is the 47th clone created by Dr. Otto Wolfgang Ort-Meyer.
Dr. Ort-Meyer is also one of Hitman’s “five fathers,” meaning the five men whose DNA has contributed to making the clone. The others are Chinese triad boss Lee Hong, Colombian drug lord Pablo Ochoa, Austrian terrorist leader Frantz Fuchs, and Arkadij Jegorov, a Russian-Kazakh gunrunner.
