Contrariwise: Literary Tattoos

This tattoo was submitted by Sarah Bohr:

My tattoo is a tribute to J.R.R. Tolkien, whom I’ve had a lifelong relationship with through his books. I first read The Hobbit when I was four and five (it took me a while) and Tolkien has been a major influence in my life ever since. It’s also a tribute to my family - the outer ring of the tattoo is the language Quenya written in the Tengwar script, and is the first and middle names of myself and my immediate family. I included my own name because I am named after a close aunt and great grandmother. I translated and designed the tattoo myself, and my baby brother (a 23 year-old professional tattoo artist) did the inkwork.

Artwork from Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

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This tattoo was submitted by Austin:

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

- Ernest Hemingway

Modblog posted this yesterday:

Her right leg is the lyrics from “The Goodbye Song” by New Found Glory.  Her left leg is the lyrics from “If You Do, If You Don’t” by Cartel.

Click for the lyrics: » Read more after the jump →

The head Sublime, the heart Pathos, the genitals Beauty, the hands & feet Proportion.
As the air to a bird or the sea to a fish, so is contempt to the contemptible.
The crow wish’d every thing was black, the owl, that every thing was white.
Exuberance is Beauty.
If the lion was advised by the fox. he would be cunning.
Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.
Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.
Where man is not, nature is barren.
Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ’d.
Enough! or Too much.

- Excerpt from “Proverbs of Hell” in William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

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All the Woulda-Coulda-Shouldas
Layin’ in the sun,
Talkin’ ’bout the things
They woulda coulda shoulda done…
But those Woulda-Coulda-Shouldas
All ran away and hid
From one little Did.

- Woulda Coulda Shoulda by Shel Silverstein (from Falling Up)

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“Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.”

- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

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Dr. Seuss sleeve submitted by Jenny:

The reason i chose Dr. seuss for my left sleeve is because of his background and his amazing stories. He started out drawing cartoons and making anti-nazi war propoganda during WWII …I love his stories because they all have fantastic morals, and are all about understanding and being anti-racist and against discrimination. I admire him very much.

» Read more after the jump →

be of love (a little) more careful
than of everything
guard her perhaps only
A trifle less (merely beyond how very)
closely than nothing
remember love by frequent
anguish (imagine
her least never with most
memory)
give entirely each
forever its freedom

(dare until a flower,
understanding ceaselessly sunlight
open what thousandth why and
discover laughing)

- e. e. cummings, be of love (a little)

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From The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.

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This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

- Hamlet, Act I, sc. iii

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There is a feeling that I had Friday night after the homecoming game that I don’t know if I will ever be able to describe except to say that it is warm. Sam and Patrick drove me to the party that night, and I sat in the middle of Sam’s pickup truck. Sam loves her pickup truck because I think it reminds her of her dad. The feeling I had happened when Sam told Patrick to find a station on the radio. And he kept getting commercials. And commercials. And a really bad song about love that had the word “baby” in it. And then more commercials. And finally he found this really amazing song about this boy, and we all got quiet.

Sam tapped her hand on the steering wheel. Patrick held his hand outside the car and made air waves. And I just sat between them. After the song finished, I said something.

“I feel infinite.”

And Sam and Patrick looked at me like I said the greatest thing they ever heard. Because the song was that great and because we all really paid attention to it. Five minutes of a lifetime were truly spend, and we felt young in a good way.”

- From The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

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“I am the Lorax, I speak for the trees!”

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing’s going to get better, it’s not.”

- From The Lorax by Dr. Seuss

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“I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”

- from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot

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The Shakespeare tattoo.

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“I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”

- Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath

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Death Eater tattoo from the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling.

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i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

- e. e. cummings, i carry your heart with me

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I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.

- Excerpt from Song of Myself by Walt Whitman

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From the Disney version of Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie.

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