Musician tattoos Anne Frank on his face

The American hip-hop artist has sparked controversy online after deciding to permanently etch the features of the famous memoir's author on his face.

SEPTEMBER 18, 2017 15:49

Updated: SEPTEMBER 19, 2017 02:24

Musician sparks controversy after tattooing Anne Frank's features on his face. (photo credit: INSTAGRAM) — Musician sparks controversy after tattooing Anne Frank's features on his face.

(photo credit: INSTAGRAM)

A little-known American musician is getting recognition in some corners of the Internet recently – but not for his music.

Arnold Gutierrez, a hip hop DJ and producer in Los Angeles, has been making the rounds on social media after he recently tattooed an image of Anne Frank on his face. Gutierrez, who goes by the moniker ArnoldisDead and is part of the group Xanarchy, has understandably received some attention for the prominent tattoo, which covers most of his right cheek.

In a video posted on Twitter last week by Justin Staple, a VICE video and music producer, Gutierrez, 21, explains the reasoning behind the tattoo.

“There are people in history that didn’t have the power to control, to actually do things that they wanted to do with their lives,” he said. “To be stuck in, like, a house, and end up dying and shit, dude I’m dying to make music. That’s the way I look at it. It’s very black and white.”

and now, @Arnoldisnotdead explains his anne frank face tattoo for the people pic.twitter.com/a39cl0CHcr
— Justin Staple (@justinstaple) September 13, 2017

Gutierrez continued: “She ended up getting caught and ended up being murdered and yo – I’ve been put at gunpoint and I’ve had a lot of serious shit in my life before and like seeing that shit, you can’t get any worse than being killed off in your own country.”

The 21-year-old said he was never particularly studious in school, but his favorite subject was history, and he remembers learning about the Holocaust.

“Seeing like Jewish people come in, in my own classroom and seeing them talk about the Holocaust, like survivors... that shit always stuck to me personally,” he said.

I can't for the life of me think of a reason to tattoo Anne Frank on ur face pic.twitter.com/rB2eJloZtH
— No Jumper (@nojumperdotcom) September 12, 2017

Frank, who was murdered in Bergen-Belsen in 1945 at age 15, is one of the most famous faces of the Nazi Holocaust. Her diary, published after her death, details her years in hiding from the Nazis in an attack in Amsterdam, before her eventual capture and murder.

But in a video posted on You- Tube on Sunday, video blogger Adam Grandmaison, aka Adam22, asked Gutierrez why he got the tattoo.

The answer: “Xan Frank, dog, Xanarchy,” he said, referencing the name of his group.

The image also gained notoriety after someone posted it on Reddit, a wildly popular online discussion forum. The post was upvoted more than 10,000 times.

Gutierrez himself first posted the visible tattoo on his Instagram page in early September, with only the caption “Pew Pew Pew” and an emoji of a bomb and two guns.