Inked

While I do not have any tattoos, I am a great admirer of them. (I just can't commit to something that permanent. The fact that my ears are pierced is a bit of an anomoly.) My friend Stacie sent me a link to this cool story in New York Magazine about an anthology of tattoos inspired by literature that came out this week. The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide is a full-color photo-and-text anthology edited by Eva Talmadge and Justin Taylor, from Harper Perennial.

I think that if I were to ever get a tattoo, it would have to be a literary tattoo. It wouldn't be something from Jane Austen though. I consider tattoos such a cool and rebellious thing that it would have to be something from a book that inspired me when I was young, like The Catcher in the Rye. Maybe something like: I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It's awful. If I'm on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I'm going, I'm liable to say I'm going to the opera. It's terrible. Or my favorite line from Auntie Mame: Live, Live, Live! Life's a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death!

Do you a literary tattoo already? If not, what would you pick?