Understanding The Southside Twenty Boys Gang Symbol
The Southside Twenty Boys is a Chicago-based street gang that emerged from the Austin neighborhood on the West Side before establishing presence on the South Side as well. The gang symbol you will see referenced online, in law enforcement literature, and in graffiti documentation is a combination of lettering, numerals, and hand signs that members use to identify territory, rank, and allegiance. It is not a single static image. It is a system of identifiers that changes depending on who is drawing it, where they are standing, and what sub-alliance within the organization they belong to. If you are looking for a clean, finalized image of "the" symbol, you are going to have a bad time. I spent about six months tracking down high-resolution examples for a research project I was doing a few years back, and I ended up cross-referencing police reports, court exhibits, and dozens of social media screenshots just to realize there was no single version. The symbols shift. Members add personal flourishes, incorporate cell affiliations, and update designs when leadership changes or rival groups adopt similar imagery. What you find on a tattoo forum in 2019 will not match what was being drawn in 2023. The core elements you will encounter consistently are the number "20," the abbreviation "SB" or "TSB," and variations of hand signs associated with the gang. The "20" is often stylized with sharp angles and connected letterforms, sometimes integrated into a larger tag that includes the member's assigned number within the crew. The hand sign typically involves specific finger configurations that correspond to letters in the alphabet cipher commonly used by Chicago gangs. Index and middle fingers extended, ring and pinky curled, thumb tucked — that configuration maps to the letter "T." Variations exist for different cells.
One thing most people miss is that the gang symbol functions as a communication tool, not just a logo. When you see the symbol spray-painted on a wall, the placement matters. Height above ground, proximity to a corner store, direction the lettering faces — all of these convey information about territorial control, recent activity, or warnings. A symbol painted at ankle height is very different from one painted six feet up. I learned this the hard way when I was analyzing photo evidence from a case and initially dismissed several tags as decorative because they were small and low on a wall. They were not decorative. They were marking something specific about that space. Once I started cataloging the vertical placement alongside known incident locations, the pattern became clear. Another counter-intuitive point: the "fall" part of this topic is not really about the symbol dying out. Gang symbols tend to persist long after the active membership of a crew has declined or dispersed. The imagery gets recycled, adopted by newer groups, or turned into aesthetic reference material on social media platforms. A lot of the images circulating online labeled as "Southside Twenty Boys symbols" are actually from former members posting nostalgic content, or from entirely different crews using similar stylistic elements. You cannot reliably attribute a specific image to the group without corroborating context — a timestamped photo, a court document, or a verified social media post from an identified member. Here is where the practical problems show up. If you are trying to document or catalog these symbols for academic or journalistic work, you will run into the problem of verification. There is no central registry. Police departments maintain internal databases, but those are not publicly accessible. Social media platforms routinely remove gang-related content, which means historical records get deleted. I had a PDF report I had been working from for two months disappear when a source link was taken down. I had to reconstruct the information from archived versions and cross-check it against three other sources. It took another two weeks.
The most reliable sources you will find are publicly available court documents and law enforcement press releases. Federal and state indictments often include photographs of gang-related imagery as exhibits, and those images are part of the public record. The Chicago Police Department's gang unit also publishes periodic reports that reference specific symbols and their meanings. These are dense, legalistic, and dry, but they are accurate because they are used in prosecution. A civil rights attorney I worked with on a related project showed me how to pull sealed documents through FOIA requests, which unlocked several high-quality image sets that never appeared in news coverage. For people who are simply looking to understand the symbolism rather than collect images, the takeaway is this: the Southside Twenty Boys gang symbol is not a monolith. It is a living, changing set of visual markers tied to a specific organization with internal structure, regional variation, and a history that spans decades. The imagery you see today is shaped by who is still active, who has moved on, and what rival groups are doing. If someone claims to have the definitive version, they are either oversimplifying or selling something.
Get the Full Details
