Scab Vendor: Confessions of a Tattoo Artist
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 deeply, 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.
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Book details
- Author
- Jonathan Shaw
- Imprint
- Turner Publishing Company
- Published
- Formats
- Paperback, Hardcover
- Subjects
- Biography & Autobiography › Memoirs
Biography & Autobiography › Artists, Architects, Photographers - Topics
- memoir · surreal · outlaw culture · counterculture · artist biography · underground art
- ISBN-13
- 9781681629155 (Paperback)9781681629162 (Hardcover)
About the author
JONATHAN SHAW is a tattoo artist of more than four decades' practice and the author of Homeward Bound, Scab Vendor: Confessions of a Tattoo Artist and Narcisa: Our Lady of Ashes.
Shaw founded Fun City Tattoo on New York City’s Lower East Side in 1976, one of the city’s first walk-in tattoo studios, and served as managing editor of International Tattoo Art magazine.
When he’s not writing, Shaw works as a tattoo artist whose clients have included Johnny Depp, Iggy Pop, and Jim Jarmusch. His books draw directly on that world, from memoir to fiction.
Jonathan lives in New York City.