A bizarre and fascinating museum about.... (Drum roll) Phrenology.
And other such wrongheaded ideas about what makes people criminal or mentally ill. Lots of skulls. No photos allowed, but I snuck one.
and what I'm going to do is cut and paste all of my discussion/thoughts with AI while here. Before AI, i had such discussions in my own head.
In museum of criminology. Tattoos were a sure sign. One guy, a sailor, had "la colbute" tattooed on his leg. Google translate is no help. A foreign place?
AI. Ah, that’s a fascinating detail—especially from a museum of criminology, where tattoos were often seen as "marks" of deviance in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
"La colbute" is likely a misspelling or variant spelling of "la culbute" in French.
Here's what it means:
"La culbute" literally means a somersault or a tumble.
Figuratively, it can mean:
A fall from grace or sudden downfall.
In slang, especially older French argot, it could refer to:
A quick sexual encounter.
A scam or swindle.
Even death or getting hanged, depending on context and period.
In the world of criminal tattoos, especially among sailors or convicts, symbolic language often carried layered meanings. If this was tattooed on his leg, it might refer to:
Surviving a close call (a fall or escape).
A tumble into crime or prison.
Or, a nod to a prostitute or a sexual conquest, if it's the more bawdy meaning.
So you're absolutely right not to trust Google Translate here—context and period slang are everything. Want help building that into a character or scene? This kind of thing has great story potential.
Me: Oh, lots of prostitute tats!
AI. Absolutely—those old criminal tattoos were full of prostitutes, pin-ups, hearts, names, initials, and sexual slang. Especially among sailors, soldiers, and convicts, tattoos often reflected a mix of:
Love, lust, and loss (women’s names, hearts pierced by daggers, pin-up girls)
Boasts and bonds ("true love," "death before dishonor," or prison brotherhood mottos)
Gallows humor and anti-authority messages
And sometimes, coded references—sexual conquests, favorite brothels, or slang for experiences they couldn't write openly
In early criminology (especially late 1800s to early 1900s), guys like Cesare Lombroso tried to read these tattoos as signs of "born criminality." A sailor with “la culbute” or a naked woman on his thigh? Lombroso would've said: proof of degeneracy.
But to us today, they’re cultural breadcrumbs—clues to secret codes, personal histories, and whole subcultures.
If you're writing this into a scene, there's so much flavor in the way characters might read or misread these tattoos: what they reveal, what they try to hide, and how lawmen or scientists interpret them with bias. Want some era-specific slang or tattoo designs to add texture?
Me: whole thing is Au bout de fosse la culbute
AI. Now that sounds like a classic bit of old underworld or prison slang—poetic and grim.
"Au bout de fosse, la culbute"
Literally: "At the end of the pit, the tumble."
Here’s how to break it down:
"Au bout de fosse" – At the end of the pit / grave / trench.
Fosse is old or poetic French for a pit or a grave, as in a burial site.
"La culbute" – The tumble / somersault / downfall.
As we said earlier, it can mean a downfall, execution, or in slang, a sexual encounter, scam, or the end—especially in a violent sense.
Likely meanings:
1. "At the grave’s edge, the fall" – a fatal end, maybe a hanging or execution.
2. Could also be read as a metaphor for dying—the final tumble into the grave.
3. Or, in the prisoner's gallows humor way: a poetic turn of phrase for getting caught and punished, or just the inevitable end of a criminal life.
It feels like something a lifer might have tattooed as a mix of fatalism and bravado.
In a story?
A character with that tattoo might be someone who’s already accepted death—or dares it. It could also be a prison saying that the guards misunderstand, thinking it's just gibberish, while inmates know exactly what it means: you end up in the hole, then you drop.
Want a few more like this? The old French argot is a treasure chest.
Me. No. Forehead tattoo. Stay the same. In French.
AI: Oh, that’s haunting—and kind of brilliant.
“Reste le mĂȘme” — Stay the same, on the forehead?
That's bold. Permanent. Almost defiant.
It feels like someone marking themselves with an unchanging identity, no matter what the system does to them.
In a prison or criminology museum context, it could mean:
“I won’t change” – a declaration of stubbornness or resistance.
“I am who I am” – identity locked in, unashamed, unbroken.
Or maybe even fatalism – life, suffering, crime... it all rolls on, and the person stays the same at their core.
Tattoos on the forehead were rare, extreme, and often meant the person had already been cast out—by society, by the law, maybe by themselves. It screams: I don’t care what you see when you look at me.
As a writer—
That phrase could say everything about a character in three words. Imagine someone who’s been through the wringer—abuse, prison, war, betrayal—and still claims that line like a badge. Whether it’s pride or delusion or tragedy… "Reste le mĂȘme" could carry all of it.
me: all self done. Those penis tats must have hurt!
Oh absolutely—all self-done tattoos, especially in prisons or among the underclass in the 19th and early 20th centuries, were crude, painful, and full of meaning. And yeah... penis tattoos? That’s dedication (or madness, or both).
These weren’t done with modern tools. Think:
A needle or sharpened wire, dipped in soot or ink.
No anesthesia. No hygiene.
Often done alone, in secret, with makeshift instruments.
Tattooing the genitals was:
A mark of extreme toughness—a way of saying “I fear nothing.”
Sometimes part of a ritual of initiation into criminal brotherhoods or prison cliques.
Occasionally hypersexual bragging—tattoos of women, hearts, phrases like “prends-moi” (take me), or downright obscene images.
Or, depending on the individual, it might have been self-punishment, or a way to desecrate the body as a final rejection of social norms.
And it’s easy to forget now, but these tattoos were not decorative. They were biographies. Testimonies. Warnings. In a place where words were risky, and reputations made or broken in silence, the skin told your story.
The pain of a self-made tattoo—especially there—was part of the point. It proved something.
If you’re writing a character like this, there’s a goldmine in:
What they choose to ink
Where
How crudely it's done
And how others read those signs—or misread them
Let me know if you want to build a symbolic tattoo for a character. These markings can do a lot of narrative heavy lifting.
Me: Weapons. Beautiful knives, bone inlays, carved blades. Poison from a poisoning doctor. A couple things I'd rather not guess at. Most spooky, large metal crucifixes sharpened into.... like vampire stakes.
AI: Oof. That’s the real stuff. The kind of museum where you feel the temperature drop just standing near the cases.
Those sharpened crucifixes—that’s pure gothic horror meets street survival. Brutality disguised in devotion. You can just imagine someone walking into a cell or a tenement flat, clutching their “faith”… and inside, it’s a weapon. Blessed are the armed, in that world.
And then:
Beautiful knives, likely hand-crafted or lovingly customized. They weren’t just tools—they were extensions of the self. Even the elegant ones had blood on their stories.
Poison from a “poisoning doctor”? Now that’s sinister. Possibly a quack, or someone who went full dark arts—arsenic, belladonna, strychnine. That’s murder by intimacy. You have to be close. You have to plan.
And yeah… the unnameables. Every museum like this has one or two objects that make you pause and go: “I don’t want to know what that was for.” You feel it in your spine before you even read the label.
What you’re seeing isn’t just crime—it’s desperation, ingenuity, fear, dominance, power games, and twisted faith. It’s the shadow world that polite society tried to pretend wasn’t there.
But in that museum, it’s all laid bare—objects as confessions.
And the scariest thing? Most of it was done by people who thought they had no other choice.
Haunting, isn’t it?
Me:Hundreds of skulls. Crime sometimes printed on forehead. Prostitute. Brigande. Ladro.
Me: still in Lombroso museum!
AI: Ah, Lombroso.
Of course. That explains everything you're seeing.
You’re in the heart of the 19th-century obsession with criminal anthropology—where Cesare Lombroso tried to "scientifically" prove that criminals were born, not made. That their skulls, their jaws, even their tattoos, were outward signs of an inner rot.
And so:
Hundreds of skulls → Measured, catalogued, compared. He believed certain bone shapes (sloping foreheads, jawlines, asymmetries) marked “atavism”—evolutionary throwbacks to more "primitive" beings.
Crimes carved on foreheads → Not just for display, but as “data.” To him, a prostitute wasn’t a person; she was a category, a specimen.
Tattoo studies → Lombroso obsessively recorded prisoner tattoos, seeing them as proof of depravity, irrationality, or tribal criminal identity.
Sharpened crucifixes, penis tattoos, all of it → To him, these weren’t signs of desperation or trauma. They were signs of moral degeneracy.
The chilling part? He thought he was doing good. He wanted to help society by identifying its “dangerous types”—but his ideas justified profiling, sterilization, and lifelong imprisonment based on looks and background alone.
And even now, you can feel the cold logic in those displays:
> "Here’s a skull. Here’s the crime. Look closely. Don’t you see it?"
But no, you don’t. You see a life ended, stripped of dignity. And the crime, more often than not, was poverty, hunger, sex, rebellion, bad luck.
You’re standing in one of the eeriest museums in Europe. A monument to a time when science was used not to understand people—but to judge and dehumanize them.
It’s disturbing. And unforgettable.
And it makes you think harder about every label society still slaps on the living.
Me: Don't be black here, back then.
AI:
Yeah. Exactly. You feel it in your gut, standing in front of those skulls and labels—you already know who never stood a chance in systems like that.
Lombroso’s theories weren’t just wrong—they were dangerous. And though he focused on Italians, Romani, women, the poor, rebels—his ideas laid the groundwork for the pseudoscientific racism that swept through Europe and beyond. Craniometry. Eugenics. "Primitive" types. It all snowballed.
So yes:
> Don’t be poor, don’t be born in the South, don’t be a woman, don’t be black, don’t resist, don’t stand out.
Or your skull ends up in a drawer, with one brutal word carved into it.
Museums like that hit hard because they expose how "objective science" can be used to serve power, control, and prejudice. Lombroso thought he was helping society—but he was helping it build a cage for people who couldn’t defend themselves.
And what’s left now?
Glass cases.
Labels.
A room full of silence that still accuses.
You’re not just looking at history. You’re feeling its echo.
(... More tomorrow. )
