Inked at the library: Skin stories

More great examples of words off the page and into people’s lives. Everybody* has a tattoo these days. Libraries and people work well together – how ingenious to share people’s ink stories. Inked at the Library. Also see page 12 of Library Life.

My longstanding favourite ink on skin story is still Shelley Jackson’s Ineradicable Stain: a story published on the skin of 2095 volunteers (and not in any other form/container).

If everybody* has a tattoo, then librarians will have plenty of people in the community to gather stories from. An Inked at the Library project could incorporate stories and engagement, local tattoo studio/artist involvement, health information sharing, cultural tattoo information, probably even the opportunity for some healthy and respectful debate on people’s perceptions of tattoos

I like words. I like them a lot. I haven’t found just the right word for a tattoo yet, but I have found two logograms and a cultural symbol that speak volumes about what I believe. Logograms are letters, symbols, or signs used to represent an entire word.

* By ‘everybody’, I mean lots of people, but certainly not everybody (like babies, they’re too young. And squeamish people. And those who have chosen not to display their stories on their skin; some people keep their stories under their skin).