Tattoos become new 'body' of literature

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Tattoos become new 'body' of literature
October 20, 2010
By Misty Harris
The Gazette

Wherever Tess Adamski goes, Jack Kerouac has her back.

Two years ago, the Toronto woman had the closing lines of On the Road tattooed across her spine, along with a portrait of the iconoclastic author whose seminal novel changed her life. The striking image, swathing the entire top half of her back, sets Adamski among a growing tribe of bibliophiles whose passion for books is literally written all over them.

"Words are the new tribal art," says Steven Hayes, a tattoo artist at Shades of Grey in Edmonton.

"For the longest time, people would go to great lengths to avoid written words, (instead) going for kanji or symbols that denoted what they believed in. But in the last two or three years, things have got very literal."

English professor Carey Harrison has the complete text of Theodor Adorno's essay For Marcel Proust, in the original German, tattooed on his back. Rhode Island's Amanda Eleuterio got "Mischief Managed," a nod to Harry Potter, inked on her ankle on the protagonist's birthday. And baker Kristina Grinovich wears her heart for Kafka on her (full) sleeve.

A decade ago, the appeal of these literary tattoos could've been explained by their playful juxtaposition of high and low culture. But at a time when kindergartners are playing with Totally Stylin' Tattoos Barbie while their Ed Hardy-clad accountant parents watch L.A. Ink, tattoos are about as skate punk as spin class.

In this context, the lit tat might be seen less as a rebel yell than a brainy iteration of body-as-billboard, with each image or quotation doubling as a self-portrait.

Adamski, for example, says her On the Road tattoo — inked by Yonge Street Tattoos in Toronto — is a testament to "the book that gave me permission to live the way I wanted to live."

"The physical step of ink . . . (gives) the feeling that you're literally enveloping yourself in a book," says Adamski, who has 20 Kerouac-related tattoos on various parts of her body. "It's a powerful and comforting process."

Author portraits and book illustrations are another take on the trend.

Calgary's Jennifer Chocholacek, a self-professed "book nerd" (her cats, Penn and Ink, will back her up on that), has an image from Harriet the Spy on one side of her calf and an Alice's Adventures in Wonderland tattoo on the other — both inked by Pirate's Alley Studio in Olds, Alta.

"I'm the girl who lugged five boxes of my most cherished books three times in three years just to have them near me in every place I lived," says Chocholacek. "These tattoos are the stories that got into my bones. Each one is a kind of touchstone."

Both Chocholacek and Adamski are featured in the new book The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide.

The eye-popping anthology runs the gamut from Twilight's Stephenie Meyer to Twelfth Night's Shakespeare, with the most frequently inked authors being Kurt Vonnegut, Sylvia Plath, e.e. cummings and Shel Silverstein.

"A certain number of our submitters had universally recognizable tattoos, but the majority picked things that were a little more obscure or personal," says co-author Eva Talmadge, whose own tattoo of a window and a doorway — inspired by absurdist poet Daniil Kharms — falls squarely in the latter category.

Although Talmadge considers the phenomenon a sign that "being a bookworm has become cool," others take a more cynical view — as evidenced in a recent online comment thread.

"I'm sure a lot of it is just the dermal extension of their MySpace profile. 'Want to know how I feel or what I think is cool? Read my ribs,'" writes a tattoo artist identified as John. And commenter Antonio remarks: "So pretentious and hipster trendy. 'Look at me, I read."

Justin Taylor, co-author of The Word Made Flesh, swats away both criticisms.

"If someone gives space on their own body to give testimony to something else, to profess their devotion to an outward thing, I'd dismiss the charge of narcissism outright," says Taylor, a creative writing instructor at Columbia University.

"If being able to read is your idea of pretension, then you've got bigger problems than I can solve for you in an afternoon."


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