Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos tells the story of an erudite professor of English who abandoned his job to become a tattoo artist (and incidentally a researcher for Alfred Kinsey). In the early 1950s, when tattoos were the indelible mark of a lowlife, he spent 18 years working in a squalid arcade on Chicago's tough State Street. The gritty, film-noir details of Skid Row life are rendered with unflinching honesty and furtive tenderness, and the reasons people get tattoos are analyzed with rare intelligence. More than a history of the art or a roster of famousand infamoustattoo customers and artists, Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos is a raunchy, provocative look at a forgotten subculture.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Contents
Foreword
- Introduction
- From Academia to Skidrow
- A Cut-Throat World
- Dr. Kinsey (Prometheus) and the Shop
- Sex and the Tattoo: Motivations
- The Folklore of Tattooing
- The Clientele
- Barnacles and Leeches
- Excuses--Mine and Theirs, Before and After
- Masters, Methods, and Maladies
- Art and the Tattoo
- The Tattooist and His World
- The Vanishing Art . . . ?
- Appendix A: A Brief Historical Sketch of Tattooing
- Appendix B: A Note on the Literature of Tattooing
- Index
