Scab Vendor
Confessions of a Tattoo Artist
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
Jonathan Shaw’s Scab Vendor: Confessions of a Tattoo Artist is a surreal, multi-generational roller coaster ride through the underbelly of modern culture, charting the course of a life measured by extremes, and all the people, places, and events that shaped that life into a survivor’s tale of epic proportions. In its pages, Shaw takes the reader deep, not only into the recesses of his extraordinary mind and adventures, but also into the strange and magical process of memoir-writing itself.
If truth is indeed stranger than fiction, then, as Shaw’s friend and literary mentor Charles Bukowski once told him, much of this book would have to be lived before it could be written. In that sense, Scab Vendor: Confessions of a Tattoo Artist is much more than a fascinating chronicle of a popular outlaw artist's creative evolution. It is a multicolored, cinematic, modern-day Odyssey, written in blood, ink, and tears—a kaleidoscopic, visionary roadmap to the journey of the human soul.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Famed tattoo artist Shaw (Narcisa: Our Lady of Ashes) uses multiple narrative threads, vacillating between first person and third person, to tell his life story in this sprawling, experimental autobiography. The book is framed around an imagined conversation between a young man and a famous tattoo artist named Cigano Shaw's alter ego of sorts interspersed with vignettes from Shaw's life. Through this framework Shaw revisits his foggy memories of an often chaotic childhood and explores the influence of his actress mother, an alcoholic with a flair for the dramatic ("other kids got Hardy Boys I got Hieronymus Bosch"), and his largely absent father, famed jazz musician Artie Shaw, on his adult life, which was a whirlpool of drugs and alcohol. The gritty, gutter style of prose is sharpened by Shaw's gift for dialogue and sharp insight. This tale is one of shame, humility, and wonder at how it all happened.
