20th Century Ink

The greatest stain left on history during the 20th century is the undeniably horrific use of genocide as a political tool and military tactic. From the Armenian Genocide through the Holocaust and the Khmer Rouge through Darfur, the 20th century was by far the bloodiest in human history. The unfortunate thing is that the grip from the shadow of the past has held fast and is showing strong signs of continuing unabated going into the 21st century. This piece was conceived for a tattoo based exhibition by imagining the sickening use of the bureaucratic efficiency employed by the Nazis to brand prisoners in the death camps. It portrays but a small portion of all the known recorded genocides. While the numbers killed are accurate to the best of my knowledge, they are more or less is irrelevant, for our collective humanity is forever stained by the ideologies that spawned the hatred to commit these acts in the first place.