Cookies This site uses cookies to offer you a better browsing experience. Read our privacy policy to learn more I accept cookies. Vlad The Impaler tattoos are a dark and sinister design inspired by one of history's most feared figures! In his lifetime Vlad III was a ruler and leader of a region that today sits in Romania, where he is still held as a folk hero for his role in protecting people from the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans. However it his dark sinister nature that most are familiar with.

Bram Stoker based his fictional character, Dracula, on the real person with a taste for blood, Vlad the Impaler. Now to his gruesome nickname. Vlad invited hundreds of people to a banquet, people who were questioning his leadership, and had them stabbed, then impaled on spikes. According to legend he then continued to eat while watching his guests twitch as they slowly and painfully died on large spikes. Vlad is also credited with impaling dozens of Saxons in , as well as a group of Ottoman men.

Lords of darkness, bloodsuckers or monsters of folklore? Legend or reality? We have dusted them off for you about a subject very popular with tattoo artists…. So Polidori invented a weird tale, a mixture of Gothic atmosphere and explicit sensuality. Probably the last thing Doctor Polidori intended was to unleash the highly complex age-old figure of the vampire on his readers something which would later be accomplished far better by the Irishman Bram Stoker.