Kill Tally

"You are not even a peasant, you're a notch in a weapon!"

— Aesop Rock, "Save Our Ship"

This trope is common in media where there is someone who feels the need to keep track of multiple kills and show their teammates/the world how skilled they are.

Pilots in war films usually slap a custom decal on the nose of their plane to denote how many enemies they've taken down. It's not just a boost to the pilot's ego, but a morale boost to the entire squad and a demoralizer to the enemies.

Serial killers also keep a kill tally as a Creepy Souvenir. Some even do the tally on their own bodies making themselves a Human Notepad.

In Lighter and Softer works, the tally may mark down victories at a sport or challenge. They will also use paint, stencils, markers, or rubber stamps to mark their tally rather than something visceral.

If you have two or more people doing this to compete at who's the best at taking down enemies, that's Body-Count Competition, which may or may not come with a physical kill tally. If the medium itself is keeping track of dead bodies rather than the characters themselves, that's separate from this trope.

This trope occurs commonly in many World War II movies, since the practice was common for the actual soldiers in battle.

Compare Enemies List and Gotta Kill 'Em All. Also compare Tally Marks on the Prison Wall, for a non-lethal tally count.

Super-Trope to Kill Streak.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Gunslinger Girl
  • Jose notes with discomfort that his cyborg Henrietta keeps track of the men she kills for him in her eagerness to please her handler. We see that in a later episode when Henrietta says, "I know I only killed four people this month, but last month I killed at least ten! That's more than Triela even!" She's not bragging but trying to reassure the Agency doctors that she's doing her job.
  • In Chapter 6 of the manga, Jean Croce is visiting the grave of his fiancé who was killed in a terrorist bombing. He says that he's killed 56 terrorists over the past two years and will kill even more this year.
• Hunter × Hunter: Starter Villain Majtani, who claims to be a member of the infamous gang of thieves and killers, the Phantom Troupe, has hearts tattooed on his chest for every person he's supposedly killed. He's exposed as a fraud since the real Phantom Troupe are such callous mass-murderers that they are completely apathetic to how many people they've killed.
• Ace Pilot Kojiro Sasaki of Irresponsible Captain Tylor keeps one on his space fighter. Later on, after warming up to Emi and Yumi and becoming their mentor, he reminds them to keep a track of their kill count so they can update theirs accurately.
• In the Gundam parody manga Kidō Senshi Gundam-san, Amuro worries that the pilot of a skirted Dom mobile suit might be a woman, leaving him hesitant to pull the trigger. Then he spots "unspeakably vulgar" kill marks on its head, immediately concludes the pilot is male and shoots him down.

Comic Books

• In Asterix, Obelix often punches out Romans and collects their helmets, although he doesn't kill them, he just knocks them unconscious.
• Batman serial-killer villain Victor Zsasz cuts a tally mark into his skin for each person he's killed. His torso is near entirely covered with tally marks, although Depending on the Artist, he may also have them on other parts of his body too, like his head.
• In Judge Colt #1, Mark Colt fights an outlaw called 'the Tattoo Kid' who, instead of carving a notch on his gun for each man he's killed, gets a tattoo instead.
• Parodied in the Sturmtruppen: a sniper soldier starts carving tallies in the rifle's butt, one for each sniped victim. Eventually, to make place for all the tallies, he has to order a custom butt so long he can't reach the rifle's trigger, forcing him to improvise a fire mechanism using a rope and pulley.
• When War Machine got his first solo title back in The Dark Age of Comic Books, he faced a one-off villain called Killcount. His backstory was a mercenary who was granted powers by the Goddess Of Evil Kali that for every person he killed he would gain an extra life, healing him from lethal damage. This was visualized literally with a digital counter on his wrist that would tick higher with every life he took.
  • War Machine himself later gained a type of scanner in his armor that could somehow analyze every person he looked at and determine their lifetime kill count. Most of the dangerous villains and criminals he went up against didn't go past a few hundred, but when he analyzed Ares, the Greek God of War, the scanner gave a result of over 3.7 billion. On another occasion, he attempted to analyze Galactus, only for the scanner to completely malfunction and return an error as a result.
• Phoebe in Wormwood: Gentleman Corpse cuts a mark into her upper arms for each person/thing that she's killed, although she's more of a Sociopathic Hero.

Comic Strips

• One Far Side strip shows a massive tanker ship with a crazed looking pilot and a tally of small sailboats on its side.
• Garfield: The strip from January 9, 1980 shows Garfield kicking a dog on the corner of a streak and then adding a dog symbol next to three identical dog symbols on a nearby wall.

Fan Works

• Dominoes (Star Wars: The Clone Wars): Droidbait covers his armor in tally marks of everyone he's killed in combat. Eventually, his entire armor is covered in them.
• The Guy Who Cried Grendel: Grendel gets a set of killcount robes with caricatures of every major enemy he's managed to defeat. Daemons go on one side, Xenos on the other.
• RWBY: Scars: Blake knows exactly how many people she's killed. As of chapter 84, she's killed 49 people. In Blake's case, this isn't used to show how skillful she is but is instead used similarity to The Dead Have Names. At the time, Blake thought she was killing in self-defense and for a righteous cause, however she's since become The Atoner and regrets her past violence. Blake explains to her former friend Ilia that being amongst Adam's close allies is a bloody job that Ilia isn't prepared to do without turning into a monster.

Films — Animated

• In Osmosis Jones, Thrax has a chain that contains the DNA beads he's stolen from hypothalamus glands, marking each person he's killed. In Creepy Souvenir fashion, he knows from which victim each bead came from, where the victim lived, and how long it took him to get the bead.
• Puss in Boots: The Last Wish: As part of the reveal that he is death, the Wolf reveals that he has a mark on his sickle for each of Puss’ lives that he has lost thus far.

Films — Live-Action

• While treating gunslinger Quirt Evans for gunshot wounds at the start of Angel and the Badman, the doctor suggests looking at Quirt's gun to see how many notches are in the grip, i.e. how many men he's killed. (It's never said whether he actually has any such notches.)
• The Blue Max has a chalkboard filled with the names of each pilot in the squadron along with an outline of each enemy plane they shot down next to their names; at one point, there's a lengthy montage cutting between Stachel's aerial combat victories and more chalk outlines being drawn on the board. Earlier in the film, when Fabian gets shot down, the base commander erases Fabian's name and kill tally.
• Con Air: Serial rapist/murderer Johnny 23 had a tattoo added for every victim.
• In Death Race, Machine Gun Joe carves a mark with a razor on his cheek for every life he takes on the track as a penance for breaking the "Thou Shalt Not Kill" commandment.
• The Frighteners: The protagonist is able to see ghosts and also is able to see numbers appear on the foreheads of people who are about to be killed by a Grim Reaper-like monster only he can see, with number increasing with each victim. It turns out that the monster is actually the spirit of a mass murderer who wanted to kill as many people as possible to get a kill count higher than other famous killers and returned from hell to continue his rampage and get his kill count even higher. The ghostly numbers on the targets' heads are what number victim they are. When he first returned from hell and had his living accomplice kill somebody to first start adding to their kill count, they carved the victim's number into their forehead.
• The character Monk from the film Gangs of New York adds a notch to his shillelagh for every person he kills. The term "notch" is even used as shorthand with him when discussing the people he will kill as part of the street wars. When he is killed by Bill Cutting, Bill adds him as a notch and shows it to him before killing him with his own shillelagh.
• Get Out (2017): Rose keeps framed photos of her previous "boyfriends" who she helped lure into her parents' trap.
• Undercover cop Alan in Hard Boiled makes a paper crane after ever murder he commits, though this is more a case of somber remembrance than sadism. That said, his house boat is full of them. At the end of the movie, discharged and free to leave Hong Kong, he tosses them overboard in the wake of his boat, one by one, symbolically letting go of his guilt for the horrible things he's had to do undercover.
• Hot Shots! Part Deux parodies this. With every rising kill, it compares it to films such as RoboCop (1987) and Total Recall (1990), before labeling itself as the bloodiest movie ever.
• The masked killer in Hush has thirteen notches carved into the side of his crossbow for every previous victim.
• Lemonade Joe: Villain Hogo Fogo proudly claims he has 12 notches on the butt of his Derringer.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and The Return of the King have a minor Running Gag of Gimli and Legolas competing for kills, following after the books.
  • During the Battle of Helm's Deep, Legolas gets an early lead with archery kills, and Gimli has to work to catch up when the Uruk-hai storm the walls.
    Gimli: Legolas! Two already!
    Legolas: I'm on seventeen!
    Gimli: What?! I'll have no pointy-ear outscoring me!
  • After Legolas singlehandedly brings down a Haradrim oliphaunt during the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, Gimli irritably complains, "That still only counts as one!"
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Black Panther (2018): Erik Killmonger used ritual scarification to mark every life he took. His chest, arms and back are covered in these scars taking him from serial killer to mass murderer.
  • James Rhodes/War Machine has little Ultron Sentry heads on his chestplate in Captain America: Civil War.
• Pacific Rim: Jaeger pilots and base crew members proudly keep tallies of the kaiju they've fought and defeated. Some notable examples include:
  • The Jaeger "Striker Eureka" has little Kaiju stamps on its chassis to mark its kills, especially because it had the highest number of kills.
  • The pilots of Striker Eureka, Chuck and Hercules Hansen, have decals on their Drivesuits that match their tally marks on Striker Eureka.
  • Before their defeat in Alaska, pilots Raleigh and Yancy Becket had their Jaeger's name and kill tally stenciled on the wall of their shared quarters.
• In Pistolera, the title character has a bullet tattooed on her back for each person she kills on her Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
• The Quick and the Dead. "Scars", one of the criminals in the competition, is called such because he makes a cut in his arm for every man he kills. His Establishing Character Moment has him enter the bar, kick out some random guy for no apparent reason, shoot him dead as he tries to run away, and make one more cut before entering the bar again, all while chugging down a large glass of beer. Likewise with 'Ace' Hanlon who invites the Lady to a game of poker, then shows her how he's added an ace to his personal pack of cards every time he's killed someone. In a subversion Ace is revealed to be a fraud and braggart, so he was likely lying about most of them.
• The fourteen yellow-orange stripes on the side of Boba Fett's helmet in Star Wars mark particularly significant kills. When he touches up his paint job in The Mandalorian, he adds another in black, the significance of which is as yet unknown.
• In the first act of T-34, Klaus Jäger's Panzer III has several black rings painted on the cannon's barrel indicative of his tank's kill count (seven, at least in 1941)
• One of the Universal Soldier movies had a titular soldier who wore his kill tally as a gruesome keepsake: a necklace with the ears of his kills strung like beads.

Literature

• After the Revolution: U.S. Super-Soldier cyborgs have kill tallies built into their headware, giving them a heads-up display of their current kills (probably to remind them that they get treats if they make the number go up). Roland mentions that he hacked his away because the knowledge was bothering him; apparently his kill count was around 12,000 at the time he did so.
• In the third Artemis Fowl novel, the Irish mobster Loafers gets a new symbolic tattoo every time he completes a hit. Most of his body is inked.
• In Daughter of Smoke and Bone, the Seraphim are leading a genocidal war against the Chimaera. The Seraphim soldiers will cut a small notch on their hand after they've successfully killed a chimera in battle to record their victory. It's to the point that some seraphim have their entire hands covered with these notches as a sign of their success.
• In The Lord of the Rings, Gimli and Legolas indulge in a friendly rivalry at the battle of Helm's Deep that obliges both to scrupulously tally their kills; Gimli wins by one dead Orc, forty-two to forty-one. Gimli's tally is so accurate he can even place a number on the one who left a nick in his axe's blade.
• The title Monster Blood Tattoo is given to anyone who manages to kill a monster, using the beast's own blood as ink. They're usually large pictures of the monster in question; Europe, however, has killed so many monsters that she has dozens of tiny Xs covering her arms.
• In Robert Shea's novel set in medieval Japan, Shike: Last of the Zinja, the titular warrior-monk tallies his count of vanquished samurai by taking their swords as trophies to display in the fighting monk's temple. He gets into the high nineties - ninety-two victories - before he meets a samurai he respects, and realises he doesn't need to fight a vendetta any more.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • The X-Wing Series references fighter pilots' practice of marking ship-to-ship kills many times. In Rogue Squadron, squadron leader Wedge Antilles has so many that the ground crew has taken to marking them in squadrons' worth, i.e. one mark for every twelve kills (plus two Death Stars).
  • In Vector Prime, Leia and Mara Jade Skywalker complain about Unwanted Assistance from a particularly egotistical Jedi. Leia complains about him intervening to get a couple more kill silhouettes on his X-Wing, when they were trying to out-fly and evade the ambush.
• Partway through Team Yankee, the tankers of the eponymous team adopt the practice of painting a white ring around the barrel of their tanks' main guns for each enemy tank destroyed. They are inspired to do so by a German World War II veteran, who mentions the real life practice noted below.
• Why Johnny Can't Speed, by Alan Dean Foster. The protagonist is a Badass Driver in a United States where road rage is legal, and has symbols of the cars he's taken out painted on the side of his Weaponized Car.
• In the pulp series The Zone by James Rouch, Clarence vows to kill a hundred Soviet soldiers for each member of his family, killed by a Soviet bomber at the onset of World War III. When he finally achieves this, he commits suicide.

Live-Action TV

• In Arrow, Unlike his comic counterpart, Deadshot would tattoo the names of each of his victims onto himself upon completion of a job. Given that this is what the police call "evidence" it's done purely for Rule of Cool and to introduce a Chekhov's Gun, as one of the tattooed names is the brother of John Diggle, the first man Oliver Queen recruits for Team Arrow.
• Battlestar Galactica (2003): While Commander Adama discourages his Viper pilots from tallying their Raider kills, the pilots from the Pegasus paint kill silhouettes on their Vipers. It's presented as an early hint that the Pegasus crew are more unhinged than Galactica's.
• On Black Sheep Squadron, the pilots keep their kill tallies as Japanese flag stickers on their F4U Corsairs. Both historical (American WWII pilots did keep their kill tallies that way) and subverted, as the historical VMF-214 did not assign individual aircraft for their aviators.
• Booth on Bones kept a tally and knew he killed 50 people as a sniper. He wanted to save the same number of people with the [[FBI]] so he could balance the scales.
• Dexter:
  • Dexter, a Serial-Killer Killer, collects blood slides. He starts cutting his victims' faces and dropping their blood on the slide as part of his ritual early in his "career". He's forced to dispose of his box several times, but he just starts over.
  • Little Chino, one of Dexter's victims, is a gang member who has little teardrops tattooed for every person he killed.
    Dexter: Some gangs earn teardrops in blood by killing. I understand we all need our keepsakes, one man's tattoos are another man's blood slides.
• Interview with the Vampire (2022): At the beginning of "A Vile Hunger for Your Hammering Heart", Daniel Molloy is aghast while reading one of Claudia's journals because he realizes that she had kept a record of all of her homicides.
  Daniel: "Man with green vest... 'Please, no.' Man with fat fingers... 'Please, stop.' Window washer... 'I can't die like this.' Woman with purple shoes... 'Please.' Boy with inner tube and dog... 'Let my dog live.' 'Please, no.' 'Please, stop.' 'Stop.'" Oh, here's a good one. "Man in the last row of The Son of the Sheik picture show... 'You said you had cigarettes.'" It's a kill list.
  Rashid: Yes.
  Daniel: In a teenager's handwriting.
  Rashid: The final words of her victims. There are 42 pages, if I remember correctly.
  Daniel: "Schoolteacher... 'Guard your heart.'" I'm trying to think of something more fucked up than this.
• On Into the Badlands, Clippers, soldiers sworn to one of the Barons, follow a tradition of tattooing their kill tally on their backs. Sunny has killed so many men that his entire back is covered in marks. Nathaniel stopped adding marks after 999 and is waiting for a Worthy Opponent who will either kill him or become the 1000th mark.
• Parodied in the Not the Nine O'Clock News song "I Like Trucking", where the truck cab door displays separate tallies for hedgehogs, pedestrians, cyclists and cars.
• Competitors in Robot Wars would occasionally do this. Series 3 Grand Finalist Steg-O-Saw-Rus had the names of its beaten opponents written on its tail and crossed off, like a hit list, while Series 4 runner-up Pussycat had little drawings of them painted onto its body with big red crosses over the top.
• Happy, the SAMCRO hitman in Sons of Anarchy gets a tattoo of a smiley face for every murder he commits for the gang.
• 10K on Z Nation gets his nickname from his ambition to destroy ten thousand zombies. He maintains a running verbal count over the course of the series.

Music

• The song "Hit Me with Your Best Shot" as sung by Pat Benatar contains the line "Before I put another notch in my lipstick case// You better make sure to put me in my place". The implication is that that the singer keeps a tally of their romantic conquests in the manner that a soldier keeps a tally of their kills, and is inviting the listener to prove that they are more than a notch.
• In the first verse of "Sugar, We're Goin Down" by Fall Out Boy the singer sings "I'm just a notch in your bedpost but you're just a line in a song", lamenting that he means so little to his former partner as to be nothing more than a tally in a list of their numerous sexual partners.
• The back of the "Aces High" single◊ has the Eddies in the five Iron Maiden albums painted on the airplane serving as this.
• In "Big Iron" by Marty Robbins, the villainous Texas Red has made a notch in his pistol for each kill he's made, which is up to twenty by the time of the song. He's planning on making the Arizona Ranger pursuing him into number twenty-one.

Podcasts

• Ain't Slayed Nobody: A gunslinger by trade, Patience Cartwright keeps a tally of how many people they've killed by burning their left arm with a lit cigarette.

Tabletop Games

• In Red Markets members of the Black Math cult tattoo tally marks on themselves every time they kill a zombie. Their leaders have what's known as "the face full of fives".
• Item #617 on the list of Things Mr. Welch Is No Longer Allowed to Do in an RPG reads: "The forehead is not an appropriate place for a killcount holo-tattoo."
• Warhammer 40,000
  • Kharn the Betrayer, Blood Knight extraordinaire, has a kill-counter in his helmet's HUD that lets him see how well he's doing in battle.
  • Lucius the Eternal is a duelist who seeks out great champions in single combat, and scars himself for each one defeated. Given he's been at this ten thousand years and has a curse/boon where whoever kills him turns into him, he's pretty much a mass of crisscrossing scars by now.
  • The demon Epidemius, Tallyman of Nurgle, does it for a living, keeping numbers on those killed by Nurgle's demons and plagues.

Toys

• The G.I. Joe Conquest plane has several Cobra insignias at a side of the cockpit, representing how many Cobra fighters it has downed.

Video Games

• Ace Combat:
  • In Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War, when examining your planes in the hangar, the total number of your kills with each one is displayed as a sequence of ticks under its name and stats. Justified in that the player character Cipher is a mercenary, so he naturally has to wear his cred on his sleeve like that.
  • Ace Combat Infinity has this in-story with your flight lead Viper, who's made so many kills as a mercenary he ran out of room on his plane for tally marks and switched over to an infinity symbol on the tail.
• Aliens: Extermination displays the amount of enemies you killed at the ending screen of every level, and even categorize them properly, ranging from Xenomorphs to Facehuggers to Synthetics.
• Battlefield V: The The Last Tiger War Story, Peter Müller's Tiger I (No. 237) heavy tank is shown to have a kill count of seven rings painted on the cannon's barrel earlier in the war during the Libyan campaign somewhere in 1941. Fast-forward to near the end of the war in 1945, the amount of rings on the cannon has more than quadrupled, encompassing almost the entire barrel length. It is entirely possible to rack up just as many enemy Sherman kills as there are rings on your tank barrel by the end of the campaign.
• Counter-Strike Global Offensive has a similar feature with its "StatTrak" weapon variants, which track the number of kills with a digital display.
• Disco Elysium:
  • If the Player Character studies the armor of Psycho for Hire Ruud "The Killer" Hoenkloewen, he notices that he has a tally of his kills as stick figures edged into the brim of his helmet. With a high enough Perception skill, he also can notice that they are different colors and count about fifty black ones and two white ones at the end.
    The Big Guy: (about Hoenkloewen) We call him "the Killer". What do you think he does?
    The Detective: Kills black people — almost exclusively?
  • RCM officers are required to keep track of civilians they killed in the line of duty via perforations in their paper work. Kim claims that a lot of cops tend to treat this as a "ghoulish game" and thus he's extremely impressed that the Player Character has "only" killed 3 people in a very long and eventful career (Kim himself, an extremely By-the-Book Cop, has twice the kill count in an equally long and far less eventful career).
• Iji:
  • Annihilators have a kill counter built into their helmets. At times, they've attacked their own forces to up their kill count. Of course, you never see that in-game because after Ciretako (the most famous Annihilator friendly fire incident) the kill counters were removed and the annihilators' stimulant cocktail was modified making less likely to attack their allies. They were removed, then put back when it was proved how much they improve combat performance. One log you can find has the Komato who wrote the kill count display shitting himself because the counter only has four characters and will eventually roll over from 9999 to 0, and he knows how that will end for him. Apparently Iosa the Invincible reported the bug once.
  • When Tasen soldiers Naotgerai and Yukabacera were stationed near a window overlooking some birds, they too to hunting the birds and Yuka set up a kill counter machine. The machine turned out more interesting than the birds, as Yuka and Naotgerai played Dueling Hackers with it (and Iji can join).
• Runescape: When hunting chompy birds, the player character marks their kills on their bow. Showing your bow to Rantz will have him reward you with unique hats at certain kill milestones.
• Sabre Ace: Conflict Over Korea automatically marks air-to-air kills on the fuselage of your plane in the single-player campaigns.
• Discussed in Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, Luke Skywalker muses that he's got a lot of tally marks to paint on his fighter after a successful raid on an Imperial weapons plant.
• In Strike Commander, your character would stick aircraft or tank shaped decals on the side of his plane for every air and ground kill he made. As over the course of a full playthrough you could shoot down and destroy over three figures of each, they would use "5" and "10" kill versions to keep the number of decals shown manageable.
• Team Fortress 2 has purchasable "Strange" variants of its weapons that track the number of kills the player has made while using that weapon (as well as things like kills under certain circumstances or, in the case of non-damaging items, more relevant information such as the number of targets hit with the Sniper's Jarate, the number of Ubercharges deployed with the Medic's assortment of Mediguns, or the number of times the Heavy's assorted food items have been eaten), and can be seen by other players while "inspecting" a teammate's loadout or on the Deathcam if the owner has it equipped. A later patch added "Stat Clocks", which display the number of kills on the weapon itself, in a fashion similar to an odometer.
• War Thunder allows players to apply decals to customize their vehicles, with many based on historical examples, including a very large selection of kill tallies. These are purely for show however, since a players actual kill tallies would very quickly cover their entire hull, though a detailed breakdown of any vehicles kill stats are logged for screenshots and showing off in their garage.

Visual Novels

• Genocider Syo from Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc applies for this trope in the Human Notepad variant. She is a Serial Killer who carves another tally into her thigh with each life taken. This is why her Split Personality, Touko Fukawa, wears a longer skirt than the rest of the cast; to cover up her tally scars.

Web Original

• Quest Den: In the Tobak Quest intermission, Coil encounters an enemy ace with an impressive tally◊: Twelve brooms (see Real Life below), seven top hats (idem), and twelve logos of rival corporations. Coil tricks him by secretly reloading his machinegun mid-barrage, turning plane and pilot into Swiss cheese when the latter thinks he's run dry.

Web Videos

• Inverted in SMPLive. Players have a count of the amount of times they've died on the server displayed under their nametags.

Western Animation

• Pam from Archer has thirteen tally marks tattooed on her back, one for each person she killed fighting in underground clubs to pay her way through college.
• Blue Eye Samurai. Mizu has a diagonal cross-shaped tattoo on her left forearm, with a dot in one of the corners (which is worked into the design of the Netflix logo). She often strokes it when thinking about her vow to kill the four white men who sired her. The tattoo is a tally of her targets, and the dot signifies that she's already killed one of them prior to the series starting.
• In a Condorito short, a western gunslinger marks a tally on his gun to indicate how many rivals he has shot down. After getting a Gargle Blaster from bartender Condorito, the latter marks it on a blackboard of how many clients he has put down this way.
• Maddie Fenton briefly does this in Danny Phantom with an ectoplasmic bazooka and lipstick. She puts down two marks after taking out a pair of Walker's goons... and then sets her sights on Danny himself.
• In the Goofy short Motor Mania, a reckless driver hits Goofy and stamps a marker to a tally on the side of his car. Later, a kid on a scooter knocks him over and adds a marker to his tally.
• Looney Tunes
  • In "Scalp Trouble" (and its remake "Slightly Daffy"), a cavalry soldier shoots at Indians attacking the fort, marking his tally to the tune of "Ten Little Indians". The gag was repeated by Bugs Bunny in "Horse Hare", only he erases part of one tally because "that one was a half-breed".
  • In "I Taw a Putty Tat", Sylvester keeps a tally of all the canaries he's eaten with a bird-shaped stamp. After Tweety gets through with him, he adds a cat-shaped stamp mark to the tally.
  • At the end of "Birdy and the Beast", Tweety adds a tally after getting rid of his latest cat, the tallies going up to the very top of his tree.
• Rocky and Bullwinkle: Parodied in an episode of "Peabody's Improbable History" when Peabody and Sherman visit Wyatt Earp. Sheriff Earp had a habit of doing this every time he won a duel, but he won so many that the notches built up to such a point that the handles of his pistols broke off. Naturally, this happens right before he gets challenged to another duel.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Some clone troopers, such as Waxer, like to mark off kill tallies on their armour.
• Star Wars Rebels: The Ghost has markings showing how many Imperial ships it's shot down. They're most prominently seen when Ezra and Chopper are doing maintenance in "Brothers of the Broken Horn".
• T-Bone and Razor, the SWAT Kats, have a stamp and ink pad for this purpose, and append their latest villain defeat, Morbulus, to a wall near the Turbokat's service bay. Morbulus appears to be their eighteenth downed adversary.
• Tom and Jerry has a wartime short in which Jerry has cat head silhouettes with red slashes through them for every time he defeats Tom in battle.

Real Life

• In medieval heraldry, the number of heads of enemies can sometimes signify this. A theoretical variation can be from Portugal's coat of arms where the five blue shields signify the five Moorish kings that were defeated by Alfoso I.
• Real Life vehicle crew members ( i.e., fighter planes and tanks) and artillery gunners will often paint the national markings of the enemy they've destroyed onto their vehicle or howitzer.
• In real life, kill tallies got quite elaborate for air and submarine crews in order to differentiate the types of kills they made. For aircraft, these included (but were not limited to):
  • Bomb silhouettes for successful bombing missions.
  • Locomotives, for those that had been strafed or destroyed.
  • Swastikas/Rising sun flags, for enemy aircraft shot down in air-to-air combat (planes destroyed on the ground were either not counted, or counted separately).
  • Brooms, symbolizing a "fighter sweep".
    • In naval use (especially for submarines), flying a broom on returning to port signifies a "clean sweep", the vessel having sunk all targets it engaged. It can also be used to signify fully passing sea trials.
  • Top hats and canes, for successful escort missions.
  • British submarines included:
    • Bars, for ships torpedoed (with several variations, such as white for merchant ships and red for warships).
    • Liferings, for at-sea rescues.
    • Daggers, for cloak-and-dagger missions (usually dropping off and/or picking up commandos or spies).
    • Crossed cannons or stars, for ships sunk with the deck gun.
    • Submarines sometimes put their tallies on a Jolly Roger rather than (or in addition to?) painting them on the hull.
  • Other variants:
    • German tank, antitank, and antiaircraft crews would paint white "kill rings" around the barrel of their weapons.
    • A shared kill or damaged but not destroyed aircraft would be represented with half a symbol.
• Bad Angel, a P-51D Mustang piloted in World War II by Lt. Louis Curdes of the US Army Air Forces. After becoming an ace in the Italian campaign, he was transferred to the Pacific theatre, and managed to become one of only three pilots to be credited with kills from all three major Axis powers. During the Battle of Batan he noticed a US cargo plane attempting to land at an airfield still controlled by Japanese ground troops. The pilot didn't respond to Curdes' attempts to warn him off, so Curdes shot the plane's engines out and forced the pilot to ditch. He was credited with a kill of a US plane for this. His final score was seven German, one Italian, one Japanese, and one American aircraft.
• A variation not involving murder: the train that carries Soviet and Russian rockets from the assembly building to the launch pad on the Baikonur Cosmodrome gets a star painted on its side for each rocket it transports. Eventually, the train had transported so many, they started to paint stars with numbers written inside. They also sometimes add more elaborate pictures for significant launches or Milestone Celebrations.

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