I thought this book was great. After poring over the pictures of tattoos and the terse stories behind the ink–I left it out on the kitchen table and watched with interest as each of my three children browsed through it over breakfast bowls of Cheerios and Honey Smacks.
My 12 year old daughter took one look and decided tattoos were boring. “Why would somebody just want a bunch of words, and no pictures?”
My 18 year old son was enchanted–and inspired. “I want a tattoo,” he said. The next day he wrote his own body type up on the dri-erase board: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Even so, my soul shall rise.” He’s still working out what font to use. Meanwhile his girlfriend, the Beautiful Rachel Dill, wants to know just where Johnny plans on packing all that text.
M y 21 year old daughter Evan already has tattoos. Sort of. She was a cutter, and over the course of her Junior and Senior years in high school, she etched her own intimate messages into her flesh. She did it with great deliberation and in some moments artistry–but she did it without ink. So her tattoos are a silvery lattice of lines and cross hatchings and stars and astericks.
I wondered what she would think of this book, and whether she would see her own compulsion to cut in these pictures of people and their glyphs.
But that is the wonder of youth. Evan looked through Body Type the same way she looks through Glamor Magazine: with an unerring eye for what looks good, and what looks bad. Then she snapped the cover shut. Which struck me as an entirely unsentimental and overly critical approach to a practice that for me at least, brought back dreaded images of Evan’s personal fascination with razor blades. Or maybe Evan has just had enough of intimate messages etched in her own flesh. “I’m too old for a tattoo,” she said. End of conversation.
For a teen, reading and looking at this book is certainly a constructive use of time. It’s like a collection of the flash memoirs–each super-short personal history illustrated with an image that is worth way more than a thousand words. It is also a cattle prod to the imagination of the YA librarians: as we mentioned in class, the spin-offs for teens are endless, from imagining what kind of tattoo a particular literary character might have, to writing about the kind of tattoo that would best express their own personal visions.
But this book is also all about boundaries, and self identity, and self expression. To the mother who committed suicide, no message of pain and loss could be more graphic than her son’s response, burned into the skin of his forearm: “Hatred”. And later–”Forgiveness”.
We all need reminding. To stay balanced. To withstand temptation. To love. To heal. To hope. To stand out in a crowd. In a culture of labels and brand names, these tattoos are a way to name and declare our selves.
Finally–this book found its most enthusiastic and attentive audience in me–the 50 year old single mom who had to think about it for 35 years before she could get her ears pierced. I loved the fact these images were of text tattoos, and I loved that instead of seeing the airbrushed and perfect bodies that people popular magazines, I was seeing something genuine: real bodies, real skin, and raw emotion.
When it came to tattoos and my own children–I always reacted like any fearful and defensive parent: “Over my dead body! I MADE that skin! You are not going to wreck it with some picture you’ll hate in 20 years!”
That is still my basic take on tattoos, and that is my public line to the kids–but since spending a week with this book? I see tattoos in a new and more positive light. After I met with a lawyer yesterday to figure out how to answer my ex-husband’s latest demand that I get my degree and a 50,000 dollar a year job by last month–I thought about having 346.7 etched in MY arm. Something topical –and oh so Dewey!–about personal bankruptcy and repaying your debts.
Not only would I have Body Type in my YA collection –I’d have to restrain myself from insisting that every teen who walked into the library had to look at it.
Thanks! A fun choice for our reading list.
