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A Tattoo Tells a Story: Dorothy Parker’s Elbow Book Club

By Will Willingham 11 Comments

tattoo tells a story dorothy parker's elbow

The Tattoo Tells a Story

“Each tattoo tells a story, ” writes J. Acosta in The Tattoo Hunter. “The tattoo is a freely chosen scar.”

In a poetic style that is at once fierce and tender, he tells of these chosen scars:

I have tangos tattooed upon the nostalgia of a mouth; poems tattooed on my apocalyptic anxiety.

My conscience is tattooed.

I have tattooed on my retina a painting by Magritte, a regret on my esophagus, a tongue on my crotch, a silence on the decade of the seventies.

The tattoo is a marking of sovereignty on the skin.

. . . a bullfighting ring of epidermic calligraphy and melancholy.

Acosta’s character works a bit of illusion with the reader, first suggesting “a tattoo is a freely chosen scar, ” as though he’s talking about the colorful artwork on the skin of the tattooed. But the tattoos he speaks of color organs other than the skin–the mouth, the esophagus, the retina, the conscience. He takes what we expect to be literal — for isn’t even the most exquisite tattoo across a smooth ivory hip a freely chosen scar? — and with graceful sleight of hand inks the tattoo as metaphor. The scars he illuminates are subcutaneous, seared between mind and soul, but also, poignantly, chosen of one’s own volition.

The Story’s Tattoo

And then there are those scars that could be seen as their own kind of tattoo, carrying stories in their pigment but that aren’t so freely chosen, as in Susan Terris’ “After the Surgery”:

After the surgery when they took the breast tissue and the nipple, after twisting a back muscle across my chest for shape, they grafted skin for a new areola, cut a fishtail, formed a small bud shaped like a rose, tattooed it, (Pigment and palette, Beige 10, Beige 1, Pink 1, Brown 2) — a numb, artificial rose on a man-made hill (Hedge-clipper hum of needle, sting of punctured flesh), and I see the rosebud but how can I tender it now?

The Tattoo’s Story

The tattoo is a story with a life of its own, it seems, captured in Acosta’s “sovereignty upon the skin, ” and once visible it’s as though there is a natural bond between one and another. In Jennifer Armstrong’s short piece, “Snakes, ” she finds herself offended at the opportunistic “stained-T-shirt, jean-sagging male specimen” in the supermarket who asks about the tattoo on her arm, offering to show her his, as though it were a mating ritual for a one-night stand. But then, it’s the story.

I consider lobbing both the boysenberry yogurt in my right hand and the raspberry in my left at him. But I’m a nice person and so I carefully set both yogurts back on their respective piles and turn to slowly walk away when his voice stops me for the third time. “I got this tattoo after my father died. It helps, sort of. I turn back and look. He’s holding up his shirt for me to see a vivid red and gold snake encircling his navel. My eyes find his. They are so blue.

Join the Discussion

We’re reading Dorothy Parker’s Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos, a collection of essays, short stories and poems about tattoos this month as part of our September Tattoo theme. This week we want to consider the scars and stories — of both actual and metaphorical tattoos, the way sometimes the scars are chosen, and sometime they are imposed upon us, the ways each tell their own respective story. Perhaps you’d share your thoughts, or a poem, with us in the comments.

And join us next week for the readings from J.D. McClatchy’s “Tattoos” to Eliot Wilson’s “Designing a Bird from Memory in Jack’s Skin Kitchen” (pp. 141-199).

Photo by Luis Hernandez,  Creative Commons license via Flickr. Post by LW Willingham.

Quotations and poems from Dorothy Parker’s Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos,  edited by Addonizio, Kim, and Cheryl Dumesnil. New York: Warner, 2002.

Dorothy Parker's Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos

Buy Dorothy Parker’s Elbow now

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Will Willingham
Will Willingham
Director of Many Things; Senior Editor, Designer and Illustrator at Tweetspeak Poetry
I used to be a claims adjuster, helping people and insurance companies make sense of loss. Now, I train other folks with ladders and tape measures to go and do likewise. Sometimes, when I’m not scaling small buildings or crunching numbers with my bare hands, I read Keats upside down. My first novel is Adjustments.
Will Willingham
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Filed Under: Blog, book club, Tattoo Poems, Tattoos, Tattoos on Writers (Dorothy Parker's Elbow)

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About Will Willingham

I used to be a claims adjuster, helping people and insurance companies make sense of loss. Now, I train other folks with ladders and tape measures to go and do likewise. Sometimes, when I’m not scaling small buildings or crunching numbers with my bare hands, I read Keats upside down. My first novel is Adjustments.

Comments

  1. Maureen Doallas says

    September 11, 2013 at 11:16 am

    Love the examples you share.

    I told a story in yesterday’s poem, titled “Born in the Year of the Dragon” (on my blog).

    Reply
    • LW Willingham says

      September 11, 2013 at 7:58 pm

      The poem is wonderful, Maureen. Very poignant. 🙂

      Reply
  2. L. L. Barkat says

    September 11, 2013 at 4:37 pm

    I’m thinking about today being September 11, and I know that for some people they might be sort of done thinking about that, and for some, born more recently, it is hard to even know what to think about.

    I’m thinking of when I went to see the monument, I was struck by the choosing of the scar… see, of all the things proposed for that site, in the end the architects chose to leave the holes in the ground, and to turn them into fountains in which the water pours in and in and in to the holes and it looks like ghost water the way it changes and shimmers and comes back up invisibly probably through inner pipes… only to fall back in the holes again. Some people think the monument isn’t “much,” but to me it was amazing in this sense of choosing the scars over covering them with new buildings or sculptures.

    A scar doesn’t ask you to repeat things at crisis level, but it does ask you to remember how it got there. You might run your finger over it. You might not feel the same pain, nor should you. There’s a way in which a scar contains healing as well as a forever-wound.

    Reply
    • LW Willingham says

      September 11, 2013 at 8:03 pm

      Listened to Krista Tippett interviewing Nadia Bolz-Weber over the weekend, and the stories of her (many) tattoos came into the conversation. She told of one on her back that she got in a junkie’s apartment (something, can’t recall the details just now) that is mostly scar tissue and as she said, quite “gross.” She’s in the process of a large piece on her back depicting the Annunciation, and that area of scar tissue will be covered, which I imagine to be more like worked in.

      The scars are there for something, it seems.

      Reply
      • L. L. Barkat says

        September 12, 2013 at 9:36 am

        “working in” the scars and working in spite of them and transforming them by what we add to (or take away from) them… this is the job of the writer/artist, yes?

        Reply
        • LW Willingham says

          September 12, 2013 at 10:48 am

          One can either work them in or work around them, I imagine. Seems that even the processes that intend to remove scars leave one of their own kind.

          Reply
    • Maureen Doallas says

      September 12, 2013 at 11:24 am

      I feel the same way about the 9/11 memorial, and as I do about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in D.C., a highly criticized memorial at the time that I always found absolutely moving. I still do.

      The scar as metaphor . . . I will be thinking about that.

      Reply
  3. Diana Trautwein says

    September 29, 2013 at 8:54 am

    You know when I saw this month’s topic, I couldn’t for the life of me imagine where you were going with it. But here you are. And this is beautifully done. Thank you. I tried about 10 times to listen to that interview and it would never play on my computer. First time that’s ever happened. I could play the other videos on the site, but not that one. I still regret that. Do you suppose that’s a tiny scar, all on its own?

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Tattoo Poetry: The Ink's Journey Prompt | says:
    October 2, 2013 at 10:09 am

    […] poetry is visual poetry. It is ink transforming—telling a story or covering one, or giving a person something to live into that is yet […]

    Reply
  2. As Margaret is My Muse says:
    July 10, 2014 at 7:53 am

    […] Dorothy Parker’s Elbow book club discussion continues at Tweetspeak today with my new post, A Tattoo Tells a Story. I’d be happy to have you stop by. Don’t Make Me Think (Why Readers Want You to Get […]

    Reply
  3. Top 10 Tattoo Poems - says:
    February 18, 2016 at 8:00 am

    […] it’s true that a tattoo tells a story, and if it’s also true that a poem tells a story, then perhaps by some sleight of algebra, a […]

    Reply

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