Clustered in glittering bundles of memory, words have the power to stay with us, resonant and guiding. In rising numbers, some of us are choosing to keep these words in more than just our heads. Editors Eva Talmadge and Justin Taylor recently released The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide, a collection of over 150 photographs documenting the power that words have on our bodies. Alongside the rich imagery showing us everything from illustrations to portraits of authors to scrolling lines of verse, we also get the back-stories from the bearers, giving testimony for the choices they have made. Tempting us further:

The Word Made Flesh is part collection of photographs, part literary anthology written on skin. Special features include a reprint of a short story by Donald Barthelme (along with the tattoo it inspired on the author’s daughter), an interview with Brian Evenson about seeing his own work tattooed on someone else, Shelley Jackson’s SKIN Project and Rick Moody’s Shelley Jackson tattoo, Jonathan Lethem’s homage to Philip K. Dick, Tao Lin’s Tao Lin tattoo, and much much more.

On their blog, Talmadge and Taylor share with us a new literary tattoo every day, demonstrating that the internet, like the world, is studded with inky literati. There are some for whom visiting a library is a sufficient sojourn with the written word, but there are others for whom the library is carried in their skin, and the preservation happens most bodily, with a tattoo gun and a bouquet of the right words.

by Patricia Cram
an Editorial Assistant for Black Clock and an MFA Writing candidate at CalArts