this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2025
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The symbol in question:
I mean......I can kinda get why he didn't know. That looks like one of those blobs therapists use to figure out what you see.
I don't even see a skull and bones. I see a fish, with a railroad crossing sign on it's belly.
Even side by side, I barely see the resemblance. I guess that's what it's supposed to be, but I could easily be convinced if you show me a fish with a railroad sign on it's belly.
I can fully understand how he didn't know. I don't understand why he got a tattoo he had no strong attatchments to however. He should have at least known WHAT he was getting tattood in the first place.
In any event, nazi affiliation, no nazi affiliation, can we all agree that it's a shit tattoo either way?
It probably isn't as blurry in a mirror as it is in a flip phone video from 2015.
I'm still not sure I'd recognize it, especially not without the backing shield. Sure, you can say that's just on me, but there's so many symbols and references that lead back to nazis that I can't imagine I'll know them all. I'd counter that by asking if you'd think anything deep about seeing a Medusa tattoo.
Also, people get meaningless tattoos all the time, especially once you get over your first one's novelty. You liked it that day. No one is sentimental about their cartoon toaster. No one put meaning into every single element of their full sleeves. Right now there's a trend of just getting 20 pieces of flash, not far from the generalized traditional designs from the 1950s
Seriously, you think nobody is sentimental about The Brave Little Toaster?
I've never seen it with eyes. Even if I did, it'd barely rank higher than a meme in long term sentimentality. May as well be a sinbad S dragon
I also wanted to buy an Iron Cross necklace, but my mother wouldn't let me. I didn't know what it meant... Cause I was like 10 at the time. How old was he to not know what a Totenkopf is?
I literally just learned what it is. I would have thought it was random pirate or metal shit
OK, then look at it this way. Would you have gotten a tattoo on your chest of something you didn't know the meaning of?
I wouldn't, but then again I'm not a drunk Marine.
Like the other user above, I've also never heard of the Totenkopf and I don't recognize the emblem. Looks like any other skull and crossbones to me. I'm not saying it isn't a harmful symbol, but I can understand how a lot of people would be totally ignorant to its history like I am.
Yeah, I'm more inclined to believe that he was drunk, and a foreigner wasn't a fan of American Marines in his country, and branded him with a well known nazi symbol on his chest just to fuck with him.
Right. And you can blame bad decisions on being drunk. It's ridiculous but whatever. And then the next few decades when you ... checks notes ... don't actually look up the tattoo and ... checks notes ... actively ignore people who told you it was Nazi shit ... those years involved plenty of sober incidents.
Also, if you're going into national politics, you have to know that people will look into your past. So you ask your supporters to do it first, to deal with the rough stuff before it's trending around the globe. Every single politician in the world understands this basic point.
Would you look up something if you didn't suspect it was anything more than a random skull and crossbones? Why do you think people told him it was a nazi thing? I dunno this actually seems like a totally feasible story to me, especially when you see how shitty the thing looks.
People are acting like this is a well known symbol but I didn't know it nor has anyone in real life I've talked to about this
I would have assumed this was just a skull and crossbones design, not a specific Nazi symbol. Maybe some 40k shit.
No, but I've known people that have
It's a skull with feet for ears with twinkling toes of course.
Like if kirby swallowed a skeleton
I was seriously looking at a tattoo, but dropped the idea after running it by a friend who was more aware of the problematic implications than I was at the time.
It's not hard to make a mistake. And it might be hard to recall that, at least in America prior to 2016, we didn't generally take (neo)Nazism and unironic fascism seriously.
Anyway, as someone else said, he shows growth.
I too think the picture is uselessly bad, and that's key to another part of the story in the comments. Basically an unnamed associate seemed to be in the same boat of not knowing what it was and the man himself described it by name.
Now he didn't explicitly say it was a Nazi symbol, but he allegedly used the specific German word for it instead of saying it's some skull and crossbones.
Per the Jewish Insider citing a anonymous source, so take that for what you will
I suppose what helps for me is that the tatoo is kind of hard to make out, and he doesn't deny the design intent matches what that is purported to be. I don't know if anyone would have accurately made that connection without help.
Wait what makes it a Nazi tattoo? Are all skulls potentially Nazi tattoos? It just looks like a regular (somewhat cartoonish) skull and bones
Edit: Oh seems like part of a specific SS symbol
I mean, after the swastika, SS logo and iron cross, it's like the fourth most famous Nazi symbol
There’s a pretty wide gap between spots three and four, bud. Even before considering that you forgot about the arm bands and the mustache.
Also skulls are the most widely used symbols for all sorts of things throughout history and modern pop culture
Yeah but that's a very specific design, bud
That’s what I said lmao. And that it’s only part of the very specific design half the comment section’s never seen before. Some guy even tattooed it on himself without knowing it, buddy
I guess half of the comment section must not be used to dealing with Nazis, pal
Congrats on figuring it out. A rare sight in comments sections
That somewhat cartoonish skull-and-crossbones is specifically the symbol worn by, among some others, the nazis who operated the extermination camps.
He probably thought it's a cool Darth Vader tattoo 🙄