Portrait Tattoo Quotes

Tattoos, after all, are a passionate, usually doomed assertion of mastery of your own destiny, or at least a defiant embrace of one that you cannot control.

I hate the term undocumented. It implies people like my mother and me don't exist without a paper trail. I have a drawer full of diaries and letters I never sent to my grandmother, my father, even to my younger sister that will prove to anyone I am very real, most definitely documented; photos taped to our refrigerator, snapshots taken at the Sandy Hill house or other friends' fiestas, the Sears portraits our mother used to dress up for every year, making us seat on bus seats still as statues so we wouldn't wrinkle to have a perfect picture to send back to her mother. Don't tell me I'm undocumented when my name is tattooed on my father's arms.

She had tried to lock her sins up in the attic of her psyche as if they were a mystical portrait forced to bear the demonic scars upon her soul. But her actions had caught up to her at last, coming for their pound of flesh, and she could feel the burn of her transgressions on her skin like a half-healed tattoo.

And then the idea of a portrait, of any person, placed over your heart, forever, seemed irresistible. How was it that we didn’t walk around with every person who mattered tattooed on us forever? And then Jun Do remembered that he had no one that mattered to him, which was why his tattoo would be of an actress he’d never seen, taken from a calendar at the helm of a fishing boat.

Olive’s tattoo played an important role in the book: it appears on the face of the returned captive, where it registers as a mark of permanent violation, unlike her Mohave wardrobe, which signaled only temporary membership. Olive’s portrait, with her tattoo drawn in finer, more delicate lines than those of the actual tattoo, served as the coda to Life Among the Indians. The blue tattoo was the flourish that would make it a stand-alone story, supplying visual evidence of Olive’s ordeal and its irreversible impact.

The story isn’t just about murder. It’s about love and yearning and seduction and passion, fulfilled and unrequited. It is a portrait of a country torn apart by devastating defeat. And it focuses a remarkably attentive lens on the cultlike world of the Japanese tattoo, in all its glory and gruesomeness. Takagi explores every aspect of this “living art.” He gives us the tattooed and the tattooists, the enchanted novices and the manic collectors who pay money in advance to “harvest” the design from its “wearer” when he or she dies, an item they then mount and frame. Takagi introduces emotionally complex characters from all walks of Japanese life, each ensnared in his or her own way by an obsession with this veiled realm.

Chase became a critically acclaimed portrait painter and the most highly paid Asian artist of his generation. Jenny Shimizu became a model and one of the planet’s best-known lesbians (“a homo-household name,” as The Pink Paper declared) for her affairs with Madonna and Angelina Jolie (a career trajectory that, despite the tattoo on Jenny’s right biceps of a hot babe straddling a Snap-on tool, Ted never saw coming).