I Want To Go To There

Last night, I stumbled across the article “Lit-snobs, hot librarians, and the rise of the literary tattoo” by Eugenia Williamson because I follow @AdviceToWriters on Twitter.  The article talks about a forthcoming book titled The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide (available through many retailers).  It’s a book with pictures of people who have literary-themed tattoos.  A brief quote from the article:

With any luck, the book will be used as a primary source by anthropologists of the future who have set out to understand what happened to bibliophiles when physical books began to disappear. At the very least, they'll learn that literary passions ran broadly, and deep, and weren't readily digitized. (Williamson)

You can look at some of the tattoos on The Boston Phoenix website here, but the pictures are cropped weirdly and often cut off the tattoo.  Instead, you should go straight to the source and check out lovely Tattoo Lit site.  I spent half an hour last night pouring over the pictures, ooohing and awwwing, and plotting my next tattoo.  Reading the accompanying information sent in with the actual pictures is fascinating – these people really love both literature and tattoos.  They are passionate about both.  


I too love literature and tattoos, and I have five tattoos, although only one of them is literary themed.  Wanna see it?  I’ve wanted this tattoo design ever since I was a little girl, and finally had it inked in April of 2009 by Sideshow Jen at Devotion Tattoos in Orlando, which has since closed.

It’s a bookworm, just like me.  I had Jen base the design off Richard Scarry’s Lowly Worm character.  I caught the reading bug at a very young age, and luckily both my parents and schools encouraged voracious reading.  I don’t really remember this because it happened in elementary school, but apparently my parents bought me the first book in the Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods.  They told me if I read the whole thing and liked it, they would buy me the rest of the books.  Well, in what they deemed to be too short a time period for me to have the entire book, I finished reading it and demanded the next.  They thought I was a liar.  I must have convinced them that I had indeed read the entire book, because I still have my boxed set of Little House on the Prairie books.  The point being, I was, and am still, a very quick reader of pleasure books.  I used to “steal” my dad’s books and return them to him within a day, finished, while he was still on the second or third chapter.  And I am incredibly lucky in that my request for books was never refused by either one of my parents, even if they were “ridiculous” books by authors like Christopher Pike and R.L. Stine (which I still own!).   


So, do you have any literary tattoos?  Do you want to get one?  If you did, what would it be?