Graffiti is a form of street art and it is an art that is often maligned because some youngsters decide to apply it to other people’s property and then get charged with criminal damage. Occasionally graffiti is commissioned for the sides of some buildings, depending on the area and the purposes for which the building is used. Those people who are engaged in graffiti, whether or not it is legal, use what are known as graffiti tags.

Graffiti tags, simply put, is the way that people who know anything about graffiti, can tell one piece of graffiti from another. In some quarters a tag is much the same as a painter’s signature might be on a painting, it references the person to whom that piece of work belongs.

It is common to see graffiti somewhere in most city streets today but not many of us can recognize particular pieces of graffiti or know who might have been the author of some graffiti. A tag is often a design that is made up of one particular colour that usually contains the artist’s message to other graffiti writers, it also represents the nickname of the artist of a certain piece of graffiti. Using another writer/artist’s tag is frowned upon as a form of graffiti plagiarism – it is looked at in the same way as putting your signature to a painting that someone else has painted.

Graffiti has been part of the underground art world for a very long time but it became more prevalent and popular during the nineteen seventies. Nowadays you can walk down streets in any country in the world and chances are that more than one of them will contain walls that are covered in graffiti.

Graffiti tags and graffiti pieces are often interchangeable. While a tag is a way of recognizing a piece, a piece is also associated with a particular graffiti artist. Pieces are often used by graffiti artists who start their work with an idea or plan, many of these pieces are based on characters, and this work is often far more complicated than much of the work that is known as graffiti. Pieces are becoming very popular and some graffiti pieces have developed their own fan base and under these circumstances the piece is also the same as the artist’s tag.

While the above might seem a bit like a circular argument it is true to say that when it comes to graffiti a tag defines a piece in the same way as a piece defines a tag – that is to say each stands as a recognizable means of identifying the source or owner of that particular piece of graffiti. Although it should be noted that the tag works more as a message to other graffiti writers while a piece is more likely to be recognized by people who are not themselves graffiti artists. With pieces the fan base of a certain graffiti artist will often recognize his or her work by the characters or the form that the piece of graffiti takes – just as you might recognize a Rembrandt from a Picasso by their style.