Suicide Squad Director Reveals The Joker’s Tattoos Tell A Very Specific Story

Suicide Squad director David Ayer is just about to shift into high gear in his promotional campaign for the film, which debuts in early August.

Up to now, though, it seems like almost everything he’s said about the film has had to do with The Joker.

Not technically a member of the Squad, it’s clear that The Joker is a key factor in the film. Besides being the inspiration for Harley Quinn’s origin story, the character has been heavily featured in trailers, posters, and merchandising for Suicide Squad.

Along the way, there’s been a good deal of conversation about the tattoos the character sports — a divisive design element and one of the only things about Suicide Squad so far that hasn’t gone over with fans.

“The tattoos tell a very specific story,” Ayer told Yahoo Movies. “And eventually people will decipher them and understand what’s going on, but obviously they’re contentious, any time you do something new it’s contentious. There’s very specific stories and Easter eggs in those tattoos. And even his teeth, there’s an entire story behind that which is absolutely canon. It’s putting his history on his body. This Joker is a little more working class, who I believe could live in our world.”

A “working class” Joker is something that’s been played with recently in the comics. The New 52 take on the character — grotesquely disfigured by his own hand — reappeared after an absence wearing a pair of coveralls and looking decidedly less dapper than usual.

There’s been a lot of speculation about “stories” and “Easter eggs” in The Joker’s tattoos — especially one that many fans believe looks like a dead bird, and could speak to the defaced Robin costume on display in the Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice Batcave.

It feels good to be bad…Assemble a team of the world’s most dangerous, incarcerated Super Villains, provide them with the most powerful arsenal at the government’s disposal, and send them off on a mission to defeat an enigmatic, insuperable entity. U.S. intelligence officer Amanda Waller has determined only a secretly convened group of disparate, despicable individuals with next to nothing to lose will do. However, once they realize they weren’t picked to succeed but chosen for their patent culpability when they inevitably fail, will the Suicide Squad resolve to die trying, or decide it’s every man for himself?

Suicide Squad hits theaters August 5, 2016.