By Brittney McKenna

Tattoos have long been symbols of self-expression, and they've never been more popular. Now federal law enforcement officials may be celebrating the humble tattoo's statement of individuality for a different reason.

Last week, the FBI's Biometric Center for Excellence and the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) hosted The Tattoo Recognition Technology Challenge, an event that brought programmers together to develop algorithms that could digitally identify a person based on his or her ink.

Although tattoo identification has long been a part of police work, the current national criminal database mostly uses text descriptions. "Think of a Hello Kitty tattoo versus a wildcat tattoo -- they both might be put in a text-based database as 'cat,'" NIST organizer Mei Ngan told the Washington Post.

Criminals are more likely to have ink than non-offenders, she added.

The good news is that, according to Ngan, simply having a tattoo doesn't land you in some secret government body art database. “The government doesn’t have plans to collect everyone who has a tattoo,” she told Business Insider. “We don't want to judge, just because you have a tattoo doesn’t mean you are a criminal.”

So it's not like government agents will tell Mom and Dad about that tribal tattoo you got on spring break last year. But of course, digital surveillance has been a major controversy recently.

We asked Missy Suicide (aka Selena Mooney), co-founder of SuicideGirls -- which has played a huge part in popularizing body art since 2001 -- for her thoughts on the technology.

"This seems prejudicious and outdated," Missy told MTV News. "Between coverups, laser removal and the amount of new ink that people get every day, it seems impossible to manage this data accurately."

"It seems like a poorly thought-out plan and a huge waste of tax money," Missy added. "Nearly half of women under 35 have tattoos. If they are looking to track solely the criminal element, seems like there are better ways to go about it."