The 7-Year-Old With the Gang Sign Tattoo

Are you too true to the game if you mark your second-grader with your gang’s tattoo?

How young is too young to force your child to get a tattoo? At long last, we have an answer: Enrique Gonzalez now faces a six-year sentence for making his 7-year-old son get a tattoo of paw prints—the sign of the gang the Fresno Bulldogs—on the side of his stomach.

Gonzalez, a longtime gang member, hired fellow Bulldog and tattoo artist Travis Gorman to ink his son. The Fresno Bee reports that Gonzalez pinned the boy to a couch as Gorman etched the black ink into his stomach. In court the boy testified, “I didn’t want it and I cried.”

Okay, so it’s one thing to suggest your second-grader get a tattoo of something dignified, like Doctors Without Borders or maybe Smoky the Bear. But the Bulldogs are one of the most relentlessly violent, drug-selling, terrorizing gangs in the nation, with their own special on The History Channel’s Gangland.

Gonzalez admitted that he tattooed his son to “promote the image” of the Bulldogs. This begs us to envision what recess playground advertising Gonzalez thought the tattoo would garner:

“Check out my unicorn stick-on tattoo. The horn sparkles.”

“Check this out.” (Boy lifts shirt to reveal tattooed midriff)

“Is that from Cub Scouts?”

“No, it’s my dad’s gang. They specialize in rape and heroin. He packed a brochure in my lunchbox if you’re interested.”

The story sprang up everywhere from CBS to Fox News when the Fresno D.A.—flailing in a pool of Bulldog-related cases—proclaimed that both Gonzalez and Gorman should serve life sentences. But on Tuesday the judge sentenced the father to six years in prison and the artist five.

We sympathize with the D.A. The tattooing should immediately disqualify Gonzalez from the Fresno’s Finest Father pageant. But this not just one man’s evil act, nor is it simply indicative of the perversion of gang mentality.

The seven-year-old boy with the paw print tattoo is emblematic of a national problem with parents starting their kids too young. Former athletes send their boys to baseball boarding school at the age of twelve. PTA presidents don’t let their children leave their rooms until their weeks ahead of their homework. And gang members initiate their sons before they even know the functions of a gang. Settings change, but the effects stay the same.

The real tragedy of this story is not that the boy has a gang sign permanently seared onto him—it’s that his father has denied his free will. If we want to raise shrewd, kind, decent men, let’s not inject our vices into them. Or, let’s them at least select the color palate of the tattoo we force them to get.

—Zak Jason