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A smashing collection of fiction, nonfiction and poetry by a diverse group of writers who delve into tattoos in terms of class, body image, history, empowerment and transformations. It's an investigation into why people get tattoos and how they transform a person's life.
Our 19 contributors are debut and award-winning. Their work includes memoir, transgressive fiction, horror, magical realism, sci-fi, literary fiction, poetry and personal essays. We have published a number of them in our previous anthologies including Liam Hogan, Karla Linn Merrifield, Claire Askew, Julian Bishop and Michał Kamil Piotrowski.
We're delighted to share with you their take on the tattoo.
An excerpt from Liz Beth Turner's intro to her poem FU:
“Growing up, tattoos, alongside piercings and brightly coloured hair, were absolutely anathema. The reasons were many and varied: I would be rejected by polite society; if I ever got arrested, I would be easily identifiable by the authorities; no-one would ever hire me; it would signify emotional instability and arrested development; I would be perceived as a n’er-do-well, a reprobate, a criminal; I should not disrespect my body in this way; it would attract the wrong kind of associates... I could probably keep adding to this list of introjects and conditions of worth that shaped my own distorted beliefs about tattoos for many years.”