Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #50956 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Synopsis
Hailed as a landmark work on body art, Parry's book explores tattooing from a variety of perspectives - artistic, semiotic, psychological/behavioural, sociological and cultural. Also featured are fascinating studies of common tattoo art themes, the social milieu of tattoo aficionados and profiles of the great tattoo artists of the early twentieth century.

Customer Reviews

Great early history of something less commonplace at the time of writing
This is a reprinting of a 1933 book, Tattoo: Secrets of a Strange Art as Practised among the Natives of the United States, its got a more than ample contents, chapter headings are clear and further summaries exist of each chapter, there's a great bibliography and a good index and since its a Dover book there's a catalogue of other titles included at the end too.

There are some black and white illustrations and the cover and back have got colour reproductions of tats on them, although if you are looking for a book with a lot of illustrations I'd think you may be disappointed. The illustrations are a little funny and cliche and not exactly masterpieces either.

This is really a sociological and psychological screed on tattoos and tattooing, when it was a lot less commonplace, frowned upon etc. when tattooing was a real curio for the majority of mainstream society.

I thought it was great but I could only give it four stars because I've passed it around a couple of friends interested in the topic and they wanted more pictures and commentry on style, trends etc.

Good but...
Although this is full of information, that is all it is - writing. There are a few pictures in the book in black and white but nothing more. I would also just like to point out that is based on the American History of Tattooing. It was also written quite a few years ago so might be abit pre-dated for some. However it was good, and the information was very interesting!