According to graphic designer Nikola Prijic, Bill Skarsgård himself submitted an excerpt from an H.P. Lovecraft poem titled “Despair” — a fitting match in all sorts of ways for 2024’s “ The Crow ” — as something his character Eric might have tattooed on his body.
Prijic took the stanza from the poem that begins with “Evil wings in ether beating” and ends “in a cloud of madness,” laid it out in Procreate, and designed a custom stencil version that could be applied to Skarsgård’s back while shooting the Rupert Sanders film . It’s always interesting when there’s a big fake tattoo plastered across an actor’s back like a billboard because, in practice, it ends up functioning like a billboard for a film protagonist’s characterization. Cultural assumptions about tattoos may not be as myriad as the different art styles people can apply to skin, but tattoos are a quick visual shortcut to signal that characters are edgy and non-conformist, ex-military or mafia, tormented and artistic, and often all of the above.
It’s an idea that art historian Matt Lodder has called “overdetermination” and that his colleague Nikki Sullivan terms “dermal diagnosis” — the idea that your tattoos reveal something about your inner truth or visually represent core pieces of your identity. The assumption has its roots in the work of 19th-century criminologists trying to find physical manifestations of criminal urges (with extremely mixed, racist results). But it.