12.28.08

I don’t want to know how people bookmark these things

Posted in Shakespeare, assorted weird crap at 11:05 am by Bill Brohaugh

Another year down, and another year without getting a tattoo. I’m aiming for a perfect record in this regard—an unblemished record, if you will. No body art, no body instructions, no body sight gags. No body mottos. No body quips. No body short stories.

I’m not kidding about the last one. A few years back, writer Shelley Jackson set out to inscribe a 2,095-word short story not on the head of a pin but on a head. A few heads. Human heads. 2,095 heads, by tattooing one word of the story on each one. I’ve been staring at this paragraph for about 20 minutes now, trying to resist the “writer’s blockhead” pun, but now that I’ve succumbed to it, let’s move on.

I ran across this project when I recently spotted a web photo slideshow displaying celebrity tattoos, and feeling overwhelmed by popular culture deprivation, I paged through idly. And stopped when I spotted Megan Fox. Not for the reason you suspect (well, not only for the reason you suspect), but because of the Shakespeare misquote she showed off: “We will all laugh at gilded butterflies” (actual quote from King Lear: “we’ll live,/ And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh/ At gilded butterflies”).

This literary skin game, ol’ untattooed me came to learn on further investigation (of literary tattoos, not of Megan Fox), is relatively popular and considerably well-chronicled. Contrariwise: Literary Tattoos brings examples of textual and illustrative body decoration based on books, poetry, songs, and other arts (ranging from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to To Kill a Mockingbird). Yuppie Punk has similar range, with a concentration on book illustrations (ranging from, yup, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to Curious George to a portrait of William Faulkner). U.K.’s Guardian reports on the practice, using Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man as a theme—made even more appropriate when you spot one of the tattoos at Yuppie Punk: The original cover art of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

The idea of a Bradbury tat is the closest I’ll come to actually considering permanent body alteration, as Bradbury is one of two writers whose work deeply motivated my love of writing (the other is Thornton Wilder, but in this context, the motivation has no connection to tattoos on The Skin of Our Teeth). But I’ll remain tattoo-free, especially in the light of Shirley Dent’s thoughts in the Guardian:

What we seek to do when we cut literature into our flesh is to make something metaphysical physical. We take tattooed literature into ourselves in the most superficial of ways, inscribing rather than imbibing its significance. Put another way, lit tats really are only skin deep, vainglorious and shallow all at once.

To paraphrase, you can’t judge a book by its cover, and neither can you judge a book by who it covers.

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