Show-and-tell Skin: Anthology Seeks Literary Tattoos

Monica O’Brien, chair of Writing and Literature at Chester College of New England, loves Beckett—especially The Unnamable. One gander at her tat (pictured left) will show-and-tell you. She loves Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. I could go on. She’s had pieces of all of them inscribed on her body.

And she is exactly who a couple of independent editors are looking for. HTMLGiant‘s Eva Talmadge and Justin Taylor want to include ink like hers in their book on literary tattoos.

According to LA Times, portraits, quotations, representations—all are eligible for the anthology Talmadge and Taylor want to put together.

The call for submissions indicates that all images must include the following:

“the name (or pseudonym) of the tattoo bearer, city and state or country, and a transcription of the text itself, along with its source.”

Editors also would like to get high-quality, clear digital images of the work (tattoolit [at] gmail.com) and a paragraph’s worth of the history and meaning behind your ink. For more info, see the call.

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Our thanks to Professor O’Brien for contributing her body of art to our blog. The translation of the tattoo shown above, taken from Beckett:

“you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that open on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know”

Now that is some sweet and heavy graffiti.