Read my latest story, "The All-Nighter", at 52|250.

Kathrin Schaeppi‘s TATTOO-PASSION: A definition says a lot about tattoos and the desire for them. What it says, however, interests me less than how the numbered sections perform acts of tattooing.

Section one breaks down the sounds and characters of the word tattoo so that they, along with related sounds, become abstract aural-visual art, inked on the skin of the air and the browser tab (or whatever media they may be transferred to). This tattooing only forms the first part of section one, however. Part b reads “that tattoo, exactly there–”. It is simple like an ankle stamp and directs us to pay attention to what follows, thus encouraging the tattooing of section two into our minds.

This second section has only one part, in which phrases are divided by full-stops with each line bearing periods in the beginning, end, and parts in-between. The effect is to emphasize each group of words, injecting them like dye through the needle of punctuation, though I’m not sure every phrase is worthy of such attention.

Section three brings us to named people and specific instances. Part a is largely informational; Oetzi the iceman did indeed have fifty seven tattoos. The commas in the last line perform less of a tattooing function than the periods in the previous section since they are expected in a list. Similarly, the dash reads more as separation than as emphasis. In part b, Jill’s feet create an aural tattoo in their rendering of tattoo. In c, “Emily D. & Phillip J.” serve as writerly temporary tattoos peeled off their backings and placed on the poem’s skin.

Section three does not so much tattoo as imitate tattoos on shoulders, lower backs, and other places clothing regularly obscures. Words, phrases, and even all of part b hide in brackets or parentheses, some in multiple layers of punctuation-cloth.

Overall, the poem is visibly broken down into different sections, themselves divided into lines and punctuation-jabs. It is, in other words, itself put together as a tatto; it is a tattoo of the idea of the tattoo or the love thereof.

These techniques would not be recognized easily as tattooing outside a poem explicitly about tattoos: content informs form informs content, at least in how we see it.

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