This beautifully produced boxed set of 53 postcards contains stunning images from the bestselling Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia series of books. These hugely popular and influential books document the Russian criminal tattoo, revealing its hidden meanings. The motifs depicted represent the uncensored lives of the criminal classes, whose tattoos were a secret tribal language, a method of showing status within the prison system. By turn they are extraordinary, artful, explicit and sometimes just strange, reflecting as they do the lives and traditions of this previously hidden...