5 comments

  1. You got a tattoo with the name of your wife along with a piece of music? That’s one of the sweetest things I’ve ever read.Andrea Gruber sang the lead in “La Forza del Destino” in San Francisco a couple of years ago, and the production had her get undressed onstage before putting on a monk’s robe in her hermitage hideout, so we got to see quite a few of the diva’s decorations in rehearsal. It was cool.Partly because I work in graphics, there isn’t any image or logo I’d actually want to look at every day for the rest of my life, so no tattoos here but congrats on spanning punk rock and classical music with one fine needle.

  2. Loved your piece in the Globe this weekend. Since you didn’t mention it, I wanted to make sure you know about John Irving’s latest: <>Until I Find You<>.The one sought is an organist whose entire body is, in the end, covered with tatoos of classical music excerpts. Tatoos and tatooing provide a major portion of the milieu of the novel – a typical complex, dark Irving story.Chuck Medler

  3. Chuck: I had heard of (but not read) the Irving, but now you’ve made me curious. To the bookstore!Actually, one of the things I wanted but wasn’t able to include was some mention of the symbolic use of tattoos in literature. Some are obvious (Bradbury’s <>Illustrated Man<>, for example), but there’s a couple I didn’t know until I started poking around for this article: “Parker’s Back,” a beautiful Flannery O’Connor story about love, religion, and tattoos, and Saki’s hilarious “The Background,” concerning a Luxembourger who’s decorated by Italy’s leading tattoo artist, and then falls into a Kafkaesque legal limbo due to Italian laws against exporting national artistic treasures.

  4. Nice job Matt! More often than not, articles on tattooing are poorly researched, and out of touch. Yours, on the other hand, was excellent and a fine read. -Chris DeBarge

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