Tattooing, an aggressive and intimidating mixture of endurance and art, is as old as warfare itself. But each generation, and each war, yields its own warrior body art. In Afghanistan, America's longest war, troop tats have matured alongside the culture's growing acceptance of ink.

To any repeat visitor to U.S. military bases in Afghanistan or Iraq over the past ten years, it seems like soldiers get more ink as time passes. Bureaucratically, the military still has an ambivalent attitude to tattoos, a vestige of justified fears