Beneath his three-piece suits, BART Board Director Victor Flores has a striking prison tattoo: “Oakland” in old English letters, atop a skyline and a sinewy tree logo that covers his entire back.
He flashes an old cell phone photo, taken nine years ago at La Palma Correctional Center in Arizona. In the picture, Flores stands, back to the camera, the ink on his skin bathed in institutional lighting. A fellow incarcerated man had scrawled it with soot gathered from under a locker. They’d improvised a tattoo gun by attaching a guitar string to the motor of a CD player.
Such body art symbolizes a past life that now seems light years away. At 33, Flores is serious, soft-spoken and largely devoted to public service. And he appears determined to move beyond his own criminal history, at times downplaying what could be a compelling personal story…