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      By far the most common writing motif was the tag. It was where a writer started, tattooing train interiors with permanent markers, declaring his presence; as FUTURA 2000 claimed: ‘Graffiti is an inner outcry of the soul telling you, you have to communicate… Tags (initials) on the insides of trains are saying, “Here I am, and look I’m over here,”… It’s an answer back to our overcrowded environment, lacking heat, hot water, and money.’[37] Some writers graduated to the exteriors of cars, where they expanded their tag into a full-fledged masterpiece to fill the panel below the windows (a ‘window-down’ piece), to cover the windows (‘top-to-bottom’), or to extend from one end to the other (a ‘whole car’ piece). PHASE 2 compared tags to signatures: ‘Most people’s signature looks nothing like the way they write other words. So I think one’s identity is expressed through their signature.’[38] Writers chose their tags for a variety of reasons. Sometimes they were appropriated: ZEPHYR tried several names before adopting his from a brand of skateboard, while FUTURA 2000’s came from the name of a typeface.[39] DAZE chose his name ‘because of the forms [of the letters] and, at that time, no one else had a name that sounded like that. No one had a name with a “z” or an “e” in it, because those letters are difficult to come up with a style for’, but he also recalled experimenting with ‘W names’ for a period.[40] DONDI sometimes wrote as ASIA, PRE, and BUS, to try out different letter combinations. NOC 167 wrote under as many as ten tags, according to DAZE, but with a style recognisable to other writers that carried through them all.[41] By contrast, BLADE was proud to have devised a new look for each of his more than five thousand pieces, never repeating himself.[42] It was important to reveal one’s identity even when using several tags, to be credited for ‘getting up’ in quantity, but the best writer’s identity was expressed in his style which might constantly evolve.

      When writers became graffiti artists, turning their aerosol cans on canvases, their tags often dominated their compositions. LEE and FAB FIVE FREDDY’s first exhibition in Milan in 1979 consisted entirely of tags on canvas. The name as central to the painting inverted the more usual practice of painters signing their works inconspicuously in a corner or even on the back of the canvas. While the prominence of the tag in these and other examples signaled the graffiti artist’s roots in writing, it also fueled suspicion that the graffiti art movement was motivated primarily by self-promotion, just as writing on the trains was. For some graffiti artists, featuring the tag signaled allegiance to their subway writing past. Others embraced the opportunity to develop a new style and iconography for the new medium and scale of gallery work.

      A sense of self-consciousness loosely connects the tags, dedications, and references to writing life that writers treated in diverse ways. The writer is aware of his audience and engages in a kind of public performance of his identity when he executes a piece. The tag obviously demonstrates this sort of ‘show-off ebullience’, as Peter Schjeldahl termed it.[43] So do shout-outs to the writer’s family or girlfriend. LEE, SEEN, and others dedicated pieces to their mothers, either employing MOM as a tag or adding an inscription, ‘to Mom’. BLADE and DUSTER both wrote their girlfriends’ names in styles that matched their own tags in whole-car pieces, a unifying design to make a matched pair of the couple emblazoned on permanently-linked pairs of cars known to writers as married couples. In an especially striking birthday dedication from 1981, BLADE outlined BLADE ‘n’ DOLORES in bright white, yellow and red against a black ground. The black letters glowed like neon, with a green aura and fluorescent decorations surrounding them adding to the night-sky effect. Such dedications extended to loved ones the fame writers claimed when their pieces ran through the city-wide transit system.[44]

      SEEN, Hand of Doom, 1980. Aerosol paint on subway car.

      Writers annotated their pieces with inscriptions that commented on the writing process. Some mocked the Transit Authority police for their inability to prevent graffiti: they teased the ‘boys in blue’ to ‘catch me if you can’. Others echoed the boasts of dance-party MCs who proclaimed mastery of the beats, the rhymes, the ladies: ‘Me and my boys turn on the toys when we seek the trains they go insane that’s

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