Monday, January 5, 2009

The Literary Tattoo

I didn't spot a shred of ink today, so let's look elsewhere for a moment.

A great site that I love to visit regularly is Contrariwise, an awesome blog devoted to literary tattoos.

On a related matter, a friend sent me the link to the following article about literary tattoos that I thought I'd share with everyone here at Tattoosday.

In 2003, the author Shelley Jackson announced that she would publish a 2,095-word short story called “Skin” on participants who agree to be tattooed with randomly assigned words from her text. The tattooees alone will read the story, which will be complete when the last commissioned word is inscribed on its bearer, sometime in the next few years. It will not be published on paper. Jackson asks applicants (she has many more than she can use) to read her novel, The Melancholy of Anatomy, to ensure that they like her writing before committing to a word, because “Skin” is what she calls a “hidden track” (in the pop-music sense) of the book; both explore the relationship between words and the body.
Read the rest of the article here.

1 comment:

Livia Indica said...

There's a website which features quite a lot of the tattoos. http://ineradicablestain.com/skin-quilt.html