Over the last six years FUEL have produced and published the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia Volumes I, II and III - and the images within have become famous in their own right, making a rather considerable cultural impact.

Now for the first time the original artworks from these popular books will be on show to see in the flesh, as it were.

Opening in London on the 29th of October at 4 Wilkes Street, Spitalfields, The 'Russian Criminal Tattoo Exhibition' will present 120 original ink drawings by Danzig Baldaev and 16 photographic prints by Sergei Vasiliev.

The drawings were made over a lifetime by prison attendant Baldaev; tattoos were his gateway into a secret world in which he acted as ethnographer, recording the rituals of a closed society.

The icons and tribal languages he documented are artful, distasteful, sexually explicit and sometimes just strange, reflecting as they do the lives and traditions of Russian convicts.

Skulls, swastikas, harems of naked women, medieval knights in armour, daggers sheathed in blood, benign images of Christ, sweet-faced mothers and their babies, armies of tanks, and a horned Stalin - all signs by which the people of a hidden world mark and identify themselves.

Definitely a must see - you've got 'tll the 29th of November to catch the show...