Tattoo Nation: Portraits of Celebrity Body Art
by David Ritz (Introduction), Rolling Stone
Book Description
Tattoos, rock and roll, and Rolling Stone-the ideal combination for the ultimate book on celebrities and their tattoos. Rolling Stone's TATTOO NATION exposes this dynamic art form in all its glory as embodied by the biggest pop icons of our time, from Drew Barrymore to Eminem, Melissa Etheridge to Ozzy Osbourne, Busta Rhymes to Mary J. Blige. TATTOO NATION features candid and never-beforeseen photographs and equally revealing interviews that chronicle the gradual emergence of this evocative art form into mainstream society via pop-culture icons. These edgy color and black-and-white photographic spreads present pop and rock icons ranging from counter culture pioneers like Janis Joplin to today's trendsetters Bjork and Lenny Kravitz showing off their body artwork.
About the Author
David Ritz is a three-time winner of the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award and has coauthored a number of best selling biographies, including those of Ray Charles, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, and the Neville Brothers.
Book Description
The Tattoo History Source Book is an exhaustingly thorough, lavishly illustrated collection of historical records of tattooing throughout the world, from ancient times to the present. Collected together in one place, for the first time, are texts by explorers, journalists, physicians, psychiatrists, anthropologists, scholars, novelists, criminologists, and tattoo artists. A brief essay by Gilbert sets each chapter in an historical context. Topics covered include the first written records of tattooing by Greek and Roman authors; the dispersal of tattoo designs and techniques throughout Polynesia; the discovery of Polynesian tattooing by European explorers; Japanese tattooing; the first 19th-century European and American tattoo artists; tattooed British royalty; the invention of the tattooing machine; and tattooing in the circus. The anthology concludes with essays by four prominent contemporary tattoo artists: Tricia Allen, Chuck Eldridge, Lyle Tuttle, and Don Ed Hardy. The references at the end of each section will provide an introduction to the extensive literature that has been inspired by the ancient-but-neglected art of tattooing. Because of its broad historical context, The Tattoo History Source Book will be of interest to the general reader as well as art historians, tattoo fans, neurasthenics, hebephrenics, and cyclothemics.
The Japanese Tattoo
by Sandi Fellman, D. M. Thomas (Designer)
Book Fourth Cover
In the fall of 1982, Sandi Fellman, a young American photographer
visiting Japan, began the series of colour portraits in this striking volume. Her subjects were the Irezumi, a secretive group of people drawn from the underworld of Tokyo and Osaka. To meet these men and women who had chosen to have themselves transformed through tattooing into living works of art was difficult, to gain their trust and to persuade them to bare themselves for an American woman and huge Polaroid camera was an essay in cultural contradiction. But Sandi Fellman's
unstinting effort has produced an extraordinary
collection of photographs, which at once document a
cultural phenomenon virtually unknown in the West
(and in Japan as well) and reveal a tradition of
artistry and dedication that knows no national
boundaries.
We enter through Ms Fellman's large-format Polaroid prints into a strange and even frightening world where members of the Yakuza, the
Japanese equivalent of the Mafia, spend hundreds of thousands of yen and hundreds of hours of pain and torment being tattooed. The range of the tattoo images is varied, examples reproduced here are drawn from Japanese mythology, Kabuki
theatre, and extend to the lexicon of the comic book and biker symbology. The works are executed by well-trained artists, men who have served an exacting apprenticeship with an acknowledged master, and who will eventually inherit his clientele and his working name. Fellman notes in her text the ways in
which the tattooer plays " with combinations of belief, fact and fiction, transferring fleeting prayers into mortal permanence, disfiguring so as to adorn, and drawing equally from beauty anf the grotesque ".
TATTOO explores the burgeoning phenomena of this most personal of art forms with over 65 full
colour and black and white original photos. Meticulously researched, beautifully photographed and presented with comments and observations by the subjects, Dale Durfee presents the very best examples of the modern tattoo. With amazing designs and remarkable people,
TATTOO is an inspiring and entertaining collection of one of the world's oldest forms of body decoration.
