My Dad told all kinds of stories about such things he saw when he was in Luzon (with MacArthur) in WWII. He said a tattoo usually was a visible consequence after a sailor/soldier had a weekend bender.
During his later career he worked in HR for a large industrial company. If he saw an applicant had a tattoo and was a fellow WWII vet, he would ask them: “tell me the story how you got that tattoo....”
My father in law and his brothers got tattoos during WWII. Their stories all started with, “I figured I was going to die….”