TRUMAN CAPOTE: “There’s something really the matter with most people who wear tattoos. There’s at least some terrible story. I know from experience that there’s always something terribly flawed about people who are tattooed, above some little something that Johnny had done in the Navy, even though that’s a bad sign…It’s terrible. Psychologically it’s crazy. Most people who are tattooed, it’s the sign of some feeling of inferiority, they’re trying to establish some macho identification for themselves.”
Alex Bell, The Ninth Circle:
“Believe it or not, some of us have piercings and tattoos and dye our hair because we think it looks pretty, not for any deep sociological reason. This isn’t an act of protest against cultural or social repression. It’s not a grand, deliberately defiant gesture against capitalists or feminists or any other social group. It’s not even the fashion equivalent to sticking two fingers up at the world. The boring truth of it, Gabriel, is that I don’t dress like this to hurt my parents or draw attention to myself or make a statement. I just do it because I think it looks nice. Disappointed?”
Mark Mahoney, Tattoo Artist, Hollywood: “People getting tattoos are often at a crossroads — a chapter is ending or a new one is beginning…. All it is, is connecting.”
Douglas Kent Hall, Prison Tattoos: “Tattoos tell stories of crime and passion, punishment and regret. They express an outlaw, antiauthoritarian point of view and communicate a romantic solidarity among society’s outcasts.”
Johnny Depp: “My body is my journal, and my tattoos are my story.”
Jack London: “Show me a man with a tattoo and I’ll show you a man with an interesting past.”
Sylvia Plath: “Wear your heart on your skin in this life.”
Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man: “All the time he had been talking his hands had wandered over the Illustrations, as if to adjust their frames, to brush away dust – the motions of a connoisseur, an art patron.”
Russell Banks: “A tattoo does that, it makes you think about your body like it’s this special suit that you can put on or take off whenever you want and a new name if it’s cool enough does the same thing. To have both at once is power. It’s the kind of power as all those superheroes who have secret identities get from being able to change back and forth from one person into another. No matter who you think he is, man, the dude is always somebody else.”
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest: “Your basic-type jailhouse tatt is homemade with sewing needles from the jailhouse canteen and some blue ink from the cartridge of a fountain pen promoted from the breast pocket of an unaltert public defender, is why the jailhouse genre is always the same night-sky blue. The needle is dipped in the ink and jabbed as deep into the tattooee as it can be jabbed without making him recoil and fucking up your aim. Just a plain ultraminimal blue square like Gately’s got on his right wrist takes half a day and hundreds of individual jabs. How come the lines are never quite straight and the color’s never quite all the way solid is it’s impossible to get all the individualized punctures down to the same uniform deepness in the, like, twitching flesh. This is why jailhouse tatts always look like they were done by sadistic children on rainy afternoons.”
Henry David Thoreau: “The childish and savage taste of men and women for new patterns keeps how many shaking and squinting through kaleidoscopes that they may discover the particular figure which this generation requires to-day. The manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely whimsical. Of two patterns which differ only by a few threads more or less of a particular color, the one will be sold readily, the other lie on the shelf, though it frequently happens that after the lapse of a season the latter becomes the most fashionable. Comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called. It is not barbarous merely because the printing is skin-deep and unalterable.”
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