Electric Fang Tattoo

Electric Fang Tattoo shows up across four images in Rockstar's Ultimate Edition material: a neon front with a snarling animal head, and interiors showing work in progress and finished pieces.

What the four shots show

A full back piece on a client standing in front of a mirror. Arm and leg work on another. A client waiting with a phone while an artist works. Flash sheets covering the walls.

That's a process, photographed as a process. Tattoos have been in Grand Theft Auto since San Andreas, and they've almost always been a menu behind a door. Shooting the session, with no catalogue in sight, suggests something more staged.

What the store listing says

The Ultimate Edition listing on the PlayStation Store fills in a bit more. It lists Electric Fang Tattoo as one of five Special Destinations that are only open for business with the Ultimate Edition, next to Rideout Customs, Sara's Unisex Salon, Stock 305 and One-Eyed Willie's. The listing says it offers over 50 signature tattoos for both Jason and Lucia, designed by the artist collective FAILE.

So both leads can get tattooed here, and the designs come from real artists. It also suggests that on the standard edition this particular shop stays shut. The listing doesn't say whether there are other parlours for everybody else.

Tattoo parlours since San Andreas

San Andreas put tattoo parlours on the map and wired them into the same stats as the barber and the clothes shop: what you had on your arms counted toward how people received CJ. It was crude, but it meant the parlour had a reason to exist beyond decoration.

Grand Theft Auto V kept the shops and dropped the consequence, and Grand Theft Auto Online turned the catalogue into the product, with tattoos arriving as things to buy across a decade of updates.

Photographing an artist mid-session, with flash on the walls and somebody waiting their turn, is a different emphasis again. The focus is on the shop as a place, more than on the tattoo as an item.

Ink on a body that changes shape

Tattoos sit in the same layer as the gym and diet system, hair and clothing: things that change how Jason and Lucia look, on a body whose shape can itself change.

That combination's expensive. Every tattoo has to deform properly across every body state, for two characters, and that's harder than it sounds: ink on a torso that gains and loses weight is a texture stretched over geometry that won't hold still. Rockstar building both systems at once shows how seriously it's taking appearance.

Could a witness describe it?

There's also a possible link to the evidence system, where your appearance is something witnesses describe. A visible tattoo is exactly the sort of detail a witness would mention, and you can't take it off between the job and the roadblock the way you can with a jacket.

Rockstar hasn't said anything about that, and the connection is our inference. It isn't a confirmed feature.

What isn't known

We don't know if it's one shop or a chain, what the options are beyond the FAILE designs, whether tattoos can be removed, or whether any of it does anything beyond changing how you look. We also don't know what standard edition players get instead, or whether there's an ordinary tattoo parlour open to them.

Related: tattoos, hair and clothing.