In 1995, Pamela Anderson was famous for walking onto the red carpet with a tattoo of barbed wire wrapped around her left biceps. This almost etched her image from the "girl next door" to the newly discovered "bad bitch", and soon pushed the spike design into the big trend field in the next few years. (She later removed it with a laser in 2014.) Now, if you haven’t noticed the proliferation of mullet hairstyles, thin eyebrows and brown lip liners, the beauty of the 90s is back, baby-it seems that tattoos didn’t exist in the past. Too much behind.

Of course, today's barbed wire tattoos need not be mutually exclusive with armbands; in fact, modern tattoo trends can include fine thread needlework or fine thread knots from the ankle to the chest cavity to the wrist. For example, Dua Lipa painted a barbed wire heart on her forearm, which proves that this style can take many forms. You only need to consider: do you want it to be easy to hide or to make it public? Big or small? Up or down? (Just kidding about the last one.)

Either way, design can have rich meaning. Although the symbolic meaning behind any tattoo is very personal, one thing that barbed wire has in common is that it represents strength, toughness and courage-dear readers, this is something that will never go out of style. See some of our favorite iterations below.

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