Tattoos as Literature. A new anthology shows us the world of tattoos and the world through tattoos

Dorothy Parker's Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos, edited by Kim Addonizio and Cheryl Dumesnil. Warner Books

This review originally appeared in Skin & Ink Magazine, March 2003

By Jerry Karp

"You got a dream, Carmey says, without saying a word, you got a rose on the heart, an eagle in the muscle, you got the sweet Jesus himself, so come in to me. Wear your heart on your skin in this life, I'm the man can give you a deal."

That's how we meet Carmey, the tattoo artist in Sylvia Plath's short story, "The Fifteen Dollar Eagle." The story pulls us immediately into Carmey's tattoo shop, the sights, smell and feel of it, and brings us to that sensation of experiencing it all for the first time, as the young girl telling us the story is doing. But this isn't just some fictional tattoo travelogue. The more the girl tells us about Carmey, his love of his work, his kindness, and the fact that his shop can't protect him from his "outside" life, the more we feel we know him, and as we walk out of the shop with the girl at the end of the story, we feel like we're taking a piece of the guy with us.

"The Fifteen Dollar Eagle" and forty-nine other selections—stories, poems, excerpts and memoirs—appear in Dorothy Parker's Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos, a new collection edited by San Francisco-area poets Kim Addonizio and Cheryl Dumesnil, featuring authors including William T. Vollman, Rick Moody, Thom Gunn, Flannery O'Connor, Herman Melville and Franz Kafka. The title comes from the editors' delight in the fact that Dorothy Parker, a favorite of both, did indeed have a star tattooed on her elbow. Tattoo themes aside, Dorothy Parker's Elbow is a cool read.

Each piece in this anthology has tattoos and tattooing somewhere at its heart, but Dorothy Parker's Elbow is definitely not a book of "How I got my first tattoo" stories. The art and process of tattooing are described, all right, with love and great attention to detail, so that we feel the blood, smell the sweat and see the art emerge, but not in every piece. More often, tattoos are used as a focus point, in stories and poems where the fact that somebody has a tattoo, or wants a tattoo or loves tattoing helps uncover who that person is and how they see their world. And like our own lives, the picture is not always pretty.

An excellent example is Alejandro Murguía's "A Toda Máquina." In this compelling story, a man bombs down a California highway in a Camaro at 80 mph, on his way to Los Angeles to turn a dope deal and bury his brother. Along the way, he's tempted to go off the track by a fiery woman, clearly trouble, whom he picks up in a gas station. The man's tattoos of the Virgen of Guadalupe are an emblem of his "one true love" and his stretch in prison, but all he tells the woman is, "Tough tattoos. Long, sad stories." And that's all she needs to hear. Absolutely, these tattoos play a key role in the man's life story and in the connection that grows between these two tumbling souls. But the story is not about the tattoos. If anything, it's about self destruction and the desperation of love. One thing you know is that you definitely want out of that car. Or maybe you don't.

Addonizio, a widely published poet whose most recent collection, Tell Me, was a National Book Award Finalist, says that receiving Murguía's story helped clarify what the collection could come to represent. "This story made us realize there was a much larger territory out there," she explains, "a way that tattooing could become a lens through which you could observe all kinds of human experience, not just the experience of being tattooed."

Dorothy Parker's Elbow delivers a full range of personal, cultural and spiritual insights about tattoos and tattooing. The collection is put together with a flow that takes the reader through traceable themes—love, war, prison life and self-discovery. As Addonizio says, "Tattoos are where dreams meet the skin." And the dreams we enter here radiate with every color in the pallet box.

Elizabeth McCracken's "It's Bad Luck to Die" is the story of a woman's long and happy marriage to a tattoo artist, in which the character says of her own tattooed body, "I'm a love letter, a love letter." At the other end, Steve Vendor's harrowing "Mondo" takes you inside a tiny jail cell where a criminal defense investigator sits facing his client, a stone killer, and is suddenly exposed to the man's tattooed torso, "a canvas painted by a lunatic, a road map to hell . . . one long nightmarish wail." In between, in her poem "Embellishments," Virginia Chase Sutton sings, "I still tingle to those tiny kisses,/explosions turned to oil, spoiled skin, permanent heat/all the way down to the bone."

Working to put this collection together became personal, at least for Dumesnil, a poet, teacher and former faculty advisor for the Santa Clara Review. "During the process of reading and choosing manuscripts to include in the book," she says, "I got my second and third tattoos. I mean, here you've got all these stories and poems staring you in the face, reminding you why you got tattooed in the first place. Irresistible. And as we put the book together, my perspective on tattoos began to change. For me it's no longer about needing a cool picture on the skin, it's about the personal story and collective history swirling underneath that image, and it's about the courage to stand with that image and honor its significance for the rest of your life."

Maybe the bottom line, other than the fact that this collection is both powerful and fun to read, is that Dorothy Parker's Elbow puts you inside a lot of different skins. To the question, "Why do people get tattooed?" each story and poem answers separately, "Here's why." But taken as a collection, the book delivers a different answer: "For the same reason anyone does anything. Because we're alive."

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