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Famous Tattoo Quotes:

The tattoo attracts and also repels precisely because it is different.
~ Margo DeMello, Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community, 2000

A tattoo is a true poetic creation, and is always more than meets the eye.
As a tattoo is grounded on living skin, so its essence emotes a poignancy unique to the mortal human condition.
~ V. Vale and Andrea Juno, Modern Primitives

For westerners, the tattoo has always been a metaphor of difference.
~ Margo DeMello, Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community, 2000

There is no underground community, no dark den of drunken sailors initiating themselves into manhood via cheap, ill-conceived exercises in bodily perforation; it's just a group of people who delight in using their bodies as billboards.
~ Joanne McCubrey, Walking Art Tattoos, Mountain Democrat Weekend magazine, 9 February 1990

Show me a man with a tattoo and I'll show you a man with an interesting past.
~ Jack London

Women, don't get a tattoo.
That butterfly looks great on your breast when you're twenty or thirty, but when you get to seventy, it stretches into a condor.
~ Billy Elmer

Tattoos are like marriage: it's a lifelong commitment, it hurts like hell, and the color fades over time.
~ Terri Guillemets

You may lose your most valuable property through misfortune in various ways.
You may lose your house, your wife and other treasures.
But of your moko, you cannot be deprived except by death.
It will be your ornament and companion until your last day.
~ Netana Whakaari of Waimana Tattoo.

What a loaded word it is, rife with associations to goons, goofs, bikers, tribal warriors, carnival artists, drunken sailors and floozies.
~ Jon Anderson, Epidermal Dalis, Chicago Tribune , 6 October 1994

Inking without a plan gives Booth freedom to explore the desires of those seated in his chair, he says, to feed off their energy, allowing his clients' demons to help guide the needle.
~ Joshua Lipton, about tattoo artist Paul Booth, Bad Skin, Rolling Stone, 28 March 2002

Primitive tribes were certainly convinced that the spirit, having escaped from the body at death, retained a replica of its earthly tenement.
They therefore used tattoo marks as a means of identification in the next world and a passport to future happiness.
~ Ronald Scutt

Tattooing is about personalizing the body, making it a true home and fit temple for the spirit that dwells inside it....
Tattooing therefore, is a way of keeping the spiritual and material needs of my body in balance.
~ Michelle Delio

I want to get a tattoo of myself on my entire body, only two inches taller.
~ Steven Wright

When the designs are chosen with care, tattoos have a power and magic all their own.
They decorate the body but they also enhance the soul.
~ Michelle Delio

A genuine tattoo tells a story.
I like stories and tattoos, no matter how well done, and if they don't tell a story that involves you emotionally, then they're just there for decoration, then they're not a valid tattoo.
There has to be some emotional appeal or they're not, to my way of thinking, a real tattoo.
It tells people what you are and what you believe in, so there's no mistakes.
~ Leo, tattooist, 1993, quoted in Margo DeMello, Bodies of Inscription, 2000