TATTOOED WARRIORS

Thompson, Ginger. Dan Alder contributed reporting for this. "TATTOOED WARRIORS: The Next Generation; Shuttling Between Nations, Latino Gangs Confound the Law." New York Times, September 26, 2004., 1. 

Excerpt from article:

Christián Antúnez chokes back a scream as the nurse sticks a needle above his left eyebrow. ''Ay, Mamá!'' he shouts. ''It really hurts.''

''Don't move,'' the nurse tells him, sticking him again and again with anesthesia.

He pleads for a break. At least four other men, all covered with tattoos, are taking needles around him, on their arms and legs, backs and chests. The whining rises from the chairs. One man has a tattoo on his scalp. Another has one over his top lip. Yet another on his neck. Mr. Antúnez, 22, has them everywhere.

The men have all come to this makeshift clinic in a neighborhood ravaged by street violence for a desperate and disfiguring kind of healing: to have their gang tattoos removed.

''Society thinks we are monsters,'' Mr. Antúnez said. ''The police want us dead. That's why we do this. If we do not take off these tattoos, we will never be able to live in peace.''

The pain, he said, seems a small price for a new life. ''I dream of being clean, even if it means being scarred.''