This paper presents the Sokoto Coventry Fingerprint Dataset (SOCOFing), a biometric fingerprint database designed for academic research purposes. SOCOFing is made up of 6,000 fingerprint images from 600 African subjects. SOCOFing contains unique attributes such as labels for gender, hand and finger name as well as synthetically altered versions with three different levels of alteration for obliteration, central rotation, and z-cut. The dataset is freely available for noncommercial research purposes at: https://www.kaggle.com/ruizgara/socofin