stuff i like. you don't have to.

Well, thanks for thinking Id know this! I tend to get a bit anal about finding out everything about something i like haha anyway I tried to figure this out a few months back and what I found out was pretty interesting. First of all, you can see the prisoners from cosmic collisions with very similar wrist and ankle tattoos:

From what I understand, if someone committed a harmless crime like theft or burgulary they would be tattooed in something called irezumi kei, which meant tattoo penalty. Tattooing a petty criminal was a much less brutal solution to cutting off the thief’s whole arm or hand, which was the norm before irezumi kei. Face tattoos were also common, usually using the kanji for “bad” or “dog” and coupled with a caning and expulsion from the area.

“A person caught stealing for a second time, for example, would usually be tattooed with two lines across the forearm to mark them as a recidivist. A third offence would sometimes result in a third stripe. More often it meant death.”

Since we can assume that Mugens wrist tattoos are from stupid things like stealing, I think that his thick ankle tattoos are probably from going to prison for the sugar ship. You cant see Mugen’s wrists or ankles in any of the flashbacks, so my headcanon is that after he jumped off the cliff and escaped he probably fucked around for a few years and got caught stealing a few times before meeting Fuu and Jin.

“After being tattooed in the jailhouse in Edo, prisoners were held for three days until the ink under their skin had dried and the wound caused by the needles used to implant it there had begun to heal. They were then released back into society, their marked bodies once again serving as signs of the warrior government’s power to punish. Not surprisingly people quickly came to associate tattoos with criminality, and those who had been punished in this way often found themselves being shunned and excluded from their communities.”