Of this photo, Nacio Jan Brown wrote simply, “This man asked me to photograph his tattoo.”

Historian Howard Brick has noted that the counterculture “defined itself by what it stood up against”—”a culture of life against a culture of death.” This photograph suggests, however, how a certain “culture of death” came to roost on Telegraph Avenue in the late-’60s and early-’70s, in the form of hard drugs. Above the tattoo of the Grim Reaper smoking, one can make out track marks.