Marked Bullet

If you think this is crazy, you should see the gun.

"It's not the one with your name on it; it's the one addressed "to whom it may concern" you've got to think about."

—Murphy's Laws of War

We all know that guns are cool, and we all know that customized guns are even cooler. But what really puts the icing on the cake is a Marked Bullet to go with that fancy AMT Silverballer that you're dying to use. A lot of vengeance seeking protagonists tend to use these types of theatrical bullets, usually to make a point that they have a bullet with their enemy's name on it, and it's reserved just for them.

Favored by The Gunslinger, And is usually used with Gun Fu, and Gun Kata. Also used with Bullet Time. Compare Designated Bullet.

Examples of Marked Bullet include:

Comic Books

• X-Calibre: During "Age of Apocalypse", Nightcrawler marked the bullets for his gun with X's (hence the name of the series).
• One Patriotic War Comic had a plotline where a Rosie the Riveter character writes a message on an artillery shell during WW 2. The comic then follows the shell across the Atlantic supply line until it is fired on Berlin. That specific shell lands atop Hitler's bunker, convincing him that the war is lost, so he commits suicide.

Film

• The Replacement Killers: In this Heroic Bloodshed film, Chow Yun-Fat's character uses a bullet that has the Chinese/Japanese character for 'Death' on its shell casing to kill one of the major bad guys. He sets one down in front of the target as a way to say "Hi. I'm here to shoot you now." Seems sort of counterproductive for a hitman to telegraph his intentions like that, but, hey. ^[1]
• Wanted: In the trailer, Angelina Jolie is shown firing a bullet that says "Good Bye" written on it. Which was more a message to Wesley than to the ones that it hit. In fact, in the same film, there is an invoked aversion to the trope, with a character whose bullets had a break-away outer casing to prevent the gun from leaving any identifying marks at all on them. When one of these bullets fails to separate from the casing it ends up playing the trope straight by making the bullet even easier to trace than a normal one would be.
• In the Resident Evil film, one of the gun shells that are falling in slow motion says "Umbrella Corp". In the second film the Umbrella logo was seen on the back of the slug itself. Both were probably to show just how big and diverse of a company Umbrella was.
• The Man with the Golden Gun: Bond is sent a golden bullet with the number "007" on it, which leads him and MI-6 to believe that the eponymous assassin has marked him for death. He hasn't.
• In The Patriot, Benjamin Martin has melted down several of his dead son Thomas's painted lead figurines into bullets when he starts fighting against the British. At the final battle, he pulls out the last painted bullet and uses it to shoot Colonel Tavington, the man who killed his son. It doesn't do the job.
• In From Dusk till Dawn, when they figure out they're fighting vampires, they decide to draw crosses on their bullets (see "Holy bullets" in the real life section below).
• In Brotherhood of the Wolf, Jean-François de Morangias (Vincent Cassel) uses silver bullets to "sign" his shots.
• In The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, Gilles de Rais (Vincent Cassel) writes "Hello" on a cannonball that is shot into an English fort.
• The Lone Ranger: The Silver Bullet was, itself, the mark and signature of the Lone Ranger, who not only used them to magically aid his marksmanship but would leave one, in cartridge, to indicate he had been about incognito.
• In Ultramarines, one of the marines scratches "Kill the Heretic" on a bullet. Of course, it gets its share of Bullet Time.
• Dr. Strangelove: The bombs in the bomb bay of Maj. T.J. "King" Kong's B-52 had "Hi There!" (this is the one Kong rode to his death on) and "Dear John" scrawled on them.
• The eponymous Priest carves crosses into the tips of bullets intended to be used against vampires. This may just be symbolic, as there are no indications that the vampires in the film are vulnerable to religious iconography.

Literature

• In the Septimus Heap series, there is a magical significance to a named bullet, and sooner or later it will always find its target. The catch, as one assassin finds out, is that this doesn't necessarily mean the target will be shot with it. The way the bullet is named is important too. If the bullet was named 'I.P.', nothing stops it from killing Iona Pot (aka Alice Nettles) instead of the Infant Princess
• Mayne Reid's "Headless Horseman". The main antagonist has special bullets, which lead to his demise (no, he's not shot with them)
• In Something Wicked This Way Comes, this is used to kill the witch, via Charles Halloway carving a "smile" on the bullet as she's weakened by positive emotions.
• Aubrey-Maturin: In O'Brien's series, reference is made to a Royal Navy tradition of the period to mark cannon balls POSTPAID. Why? Because stopping the Royal Mail was a capital offense.
• Bridget Jones, of all people, gets a named bullet in the mail in the second book.

Live-Action TV

• Parodied in Blackadder Goes Forth, in which Baldrick carves his own name on a bullet, the reasoning being that since "there's a bullet out there with your name on it", he is assured that it won't hit him if he owns said bullet.
• An episode of CSI revolves around the murder of a man suffering from Hypertrichosis (aka "Werewolf syndrome"), a condition that causes excessive body hair. To make matters even more bizarre, the guy was shot with a silver bullet. It turns out the guy wasn't murdered due to being confused with a werewolf but because he was engaged to the killer's sister who feared their children would inherit the condition. Why did the guy go through all the trouble of forging a silver bullet with the added risk of the police finding him as it indeed happened? "Seemed appropriate."
• Hawkeye and the Last of the Mohicans. Hawkeye is nearly executed when one of his own marked bullets is fired at a British officer he had an ongoing rivalry with. It turns out to have been stolen before the battle by another colonist.
• On Life, Charlie is shot, and when he recovers he asks for the remains of the bullet taken out of him. He then melts it down and molds it into another bullet, and shoots the man who shot him.
• Castle featured a serial killer who carved letters into the bullets he used to kill his victims. They spelled out a message to the detective assigned to the case.
• One episode of Smallville had Deadshot carving the names of several targets into his bullets. One of the targets was Clark, but it turns out he was tagging him with radiation so the Suicide Squad could trace him.

Music

• In the music video of "Neighborhood Snyper", the rapper Eazy-E is shown etching his moniker on the shell of an AK-47 round.
• Nickelback's "Side Of A Bullet" mentions one of these, unless they were just using the "bullet with your name on it" metaphor.
• Nonpoint's "Bullet With a Name On It" is pretty self explanatory... Though they never mention whose name.
• A line in the Bon Jovi song Love Lies goes, "Scratched a picture of a heart on a bullet and took his life away."
• Grinder by Judas Priest - "You take the bullet on which my name Was etched upon in your game".

Tabletop Games

• In the Iron Kingdoms setting, the Gun Mages are a group of people who have a knack for channeling magic through their guns. Etching mystical runes into the bullets is one technique, making them Depleted Phlebotinum Shells as well.
• The Feng Shui supplement "Friends of the Dragon" has rules for these kinds of bullets due to this trope's inclusion in The Replacement Killers and basically fitting the Heroic Bloodshed genre like a glove.
• Orkz in Warhammer 40,000 like to decorate their "rokkits" (rockets) with checkerboard patterns or shark Nose Art.

Video Games

• Halo series.
  • The shotgun shells in the first game, if you zoomed in, had hippos on them.
  • In Halo 3, if you watch a saved film and freeze it, you can see the bullets in mid-air. On the back of each of them is the word "Chief".
• Nocturne: The opening cutscene showed The Stranger carving crosses into the tips of his bullets, the practical reason no doubt being that this would make a difference against some of the monsters he hunts.
• Unreal Tournament:
  • Flak shells have a smile face painted on the front.
  • The Redeemer has Adios written on the side.
  • In Unreal Tournament 2004, it has Swallow This written instead.
• The trailer for Brink gives us a grenade with jah lick them with thunder.
• In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Ocelot has one for Snake (no, not like that). It's a blank.
• Parodied by the Spectre's Stop Poking Me lines in StarCraft II: after evidently missing with several "bullets with your name on them", he stops to consider:

No, this one has - hey, what is your name, anyway?

• The Bullet Bills from the Super Mario Bros. series games.
• In Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, you can see cannon shells with "Mercy is a sign of weakness" written on the back of the casing.
• Much like the example below, Deadshot in Batman: Arkham City uses custom rounds with his moniker on them. It's one of several mistakes that eventually lead the Dark Knight straight to him.
• Invoked by the turian military, according to Garrus. Of course, since the bullets are microscopic chunks of ammo carved off an "ammo block", no message would be visible. The message (the shooter's name) is carved onto the entire block, instead. It's specifically stated to be a symbolic gesture, of "owning your kills".

Western Animation

• ReBoot: In the fourth season, Matrix has one with Daemon's name on it. Somewhat nicely subverted, though; Daemon just stops the bullet with a wave of her hand.
• Beast Wars: Mainframe Entertainment was quite fond of this trope. Scorponok had missiles with the Maximals' logo painted on.
• In Batman Gotham Knight Deadshot leaves initaled bullets as a calling card.
• An episode of Huckleberry Hound had our hero in the Old West facing against an outlaw who threatened him with a bullet with his name on it. Huckleberry defeats him by hanging a sign with his name on the Outlaw, causing him to shoot himself.

Real Life

• Older Than Feudalism: Archaeologists have found ancient Greek sling shots with "ΔΕΞΑΙ" ("take that") written on them. The ones on The Other Wiki are dated to the 4th century BC.
• In Afghanistan a sailor got in trouble for writing "Highjack [sic] this, Fags!" on a bomb to be dropped. The sailor got in trouble because an AP photographer was standing there. This kind of thing was very common during World War II.
  • This kind of thing is still common today. What got the sailor in trouble was using the word "Fags" for that purpose.
• Jimmy Doolittle put a Japanese medal ^{[dead link]} on one of the bombs that would be dropped in his famous raid. Many American soldiers had received medals from the Japanese government for their service in WWI, and after Pearl the majority sent those medals to the Air Force with the instructions "return to sender."
• Joe Strummer of The Clash wept when he learned the phrase "Rock the Casbah" was being written on bombs in the first Gulf War.
• "Holy" bullets were actually used by witch hunters and similar sorts of for a short time. This typically involved carving a cross onto a silver musket ball. The result (when tested in modern times) was that the weapons became even more inaccurate than usual.
• Dum dum bullets were used before the creation of purpose built hollowpoint rounds. They were banned under the Hague Conventions.^[context?]

1. ↑ One could also consider that it is a bit redundant. You could mark a bullet with "Macaroni cheese" but it still means death.