Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Team extreme

Extreme literary lovers fact #1: some people love literature so much they ink it permanently onto their skin.
Extreme literary lovers fact #2: someone has created a blog devoted entirely to literary tattoos
Wow.
Check this out. From Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are.
A Latin palindrome...apparently a piece of graffiti dating back 2000 years which translates to: "The sower Arepo holds the wheels at work". Whatever that means. According to www.contrariwise.org it's "the only sentence in any language that can be arranged in a grid to read identically in any four different directions."
And I bet James Joyce never expected anyone to stamp Molly Bloom’s breathless climax in Ulysses onto her body. You'll see why the bearer of this tattoo just went with the end of the sentence
“…I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.” 
If tattooing was your thing - what piece of literary genius would you have tattooed on you... and where?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

My trademark tattoo would be a "T" on the left butt cheek and an "M" on the right. "TM", an acronym for "trademark", which would also spell my name whenever I were to bend over...