Question:
Have any of you ever read or heard of either stories or incidents
involving a tattoo that's haunted, or cursed? This isn't an
"Illustrated Man" idea; and that's the only story my mother can remember.
she is looking for hints on any culture that might have stories like this
in their mythos.
Answer:
- Jonathon Carroll's _A Child Across The Sky_ has a rather unsettling incident
involving a tattoo of a bird that suddenly decides to fly from it's owner's
back.
The Tattoo isn't haunted or cursed as such, but you'll have to read the book
to find out more.
- It's not mythos, but in one of the van Gulik's (Temple in Lan Fang, I
believe), a ruffian get his back done with a tiger mask, but is too stingy
to pay for the essential red whiskers. Without the whiskers, the tattoo
brings bad luck, with the whiskers it would have saved him from an
unpleasant death.
- A haunted tattoo was the basis of an episode of "The X-Files" -- season four or
five, I believe.
- One of Larry Niven's story in the "Magic Goes Away" fantasy universe
has a demon imprisoned in a tattoo.
For that matter, there's an episode of _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ that
involves a demon being drawn to a particular tattoo.
- I saw a gorgeous coffee-table book on tattoos at the book store a couple of
years ago. Searching bn.com or google for tattoo or "body art" (and you might
want to stick in "history", or "maori" or other specific subset keyword) ought
to get you scads of hits. There's a thriving tattoo culture which (I think) is
no longer really sub-.
In fact, just peeked at bn and one of the first few titles is: Baby's First
Tattoo: A Memory Book for Modern Parents by Jim Mullen, Barry Blitt.
- This is the kind of thing closest to what I'm looking for. While doing
websearches, I came across the following:
http://www.greenwoods.com/new_page_11.htm
It looks like a really good book, and I'll keep an eye out for it, but
it's fiction.
Have there been any books that any of you are aware of on the history
or myths of tattoos?
- Since it's in van Gulik, you can be sure it's authentic. I think that
Irezumi: the Pattern of Dermatography in Japan (van Gulik, 1982, Brill --
curious, it's not in their catalogue), mentioned on
(ttp://horimono.net/refs1.html) is by a later van Gulik... yes, a Willem
van Gulik. Robert Hans certainly could read Japanese perfectly. Still, the
book sounds as if it's exactly what you need. Google shows it for Amazon,
but Amazon doesn't show it anymore. Oh, and I just found
http://tattoos.com/mieko.htm.
- You might want to check out the south sea islander cultures.
While their tattoos are positive, meant to record status or ward off
evil spirits, you could introduce a set of ideas that were the negation
of the good, ie. do the same thing for a good tattoo that the upside
down cross is supposed to do for the christian cross.
An anime with this idea pokes up in my memory but I can't remember the
title. (it wasn't a tattoo as such, it looked like a tattoo, felt like
a tattoo, but it really was a symbiotic organism.)