Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt

This is Lauren’s.

In my sophomore or junior year of high school I was forced to read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. From the title and look of the book I was not excited to have to read it. After much procrastination I finally sat down and dove in. I read all night; reading over half of it in one sitting. I fell in love with the book and Kurt Vonnegut. This tattoo is a modified version on a illustration in the book that deeply impacted me. It’s been 6 or 7 years since that English class and this image has stayed with me the whole time. I recently had this done because I’m going through an extremely difficult time in my life. It is a daily reminder that things will always get better and in the end nothing is really ever as important as it seems.

This belongs to Marcus.

This is Brandi’s tattoo.

It’s on my upper inner right arm. It has a few little variations like the grass and clouds and the little putti guy didn’t fit.

This is Vanessa’s.

This is Corey’s.

i’ve seen a few people with the same drawing, but i still really wanted it done. vonnegut was/is my favourite writer, and this book was given to me when i entered grade 9 by my grandfather, who passed away shortly after i finished reading it a few weeks later. he meant a lot to me, and i wanted something to immortalize my memories of him. that was 1994, and this was just done last month, but i’m really, really happy with it!

This is Jack G’s.

This belongs to Ethno Organiko.

I’ve been writing for a good majority of my life, and by the time I hit 18, I decided I wanted to get a literary tattoo. Vonnegut has always been my favorite author and biggest influence, so it came down to a choice between the butthole asterisk, the “Goodbye Blue Monday” Bomb and Billy Pilgrim’s tombstone. After some thinking, I decided the asterisk would be impossible to explain or constantly be confused for shitty versions of other logos, and the bomb just didn’t seem right for me. Being an angsty teenage dork, I opted for the one with “deeper” meaning behind it, I suppose.

This is from Kurt Vonnegut’s illustration of Billy Pilgrim’s headstone in the book ‘Slaughterhouse-Five‘.