7 Tattoos

by Peter Trachtenberg

Each section in this innovative book is the story of one of Trachtenberg's tattoos, as well as an intellectually freewheeling exploration of the themes that the tattoo evokes: death, sacrilege, primitivism, rebellion, atonement, sado-masochism, and downfall. In Trachtenberg's travelogue of the body, a search for Dayak tattoos takes him to deepest Borneo, to a funerary ritual that ends in demonic possession. His youthful infatuation with Catholicism leads him on a drug-addled pilgrimage to the tomb of St. Teresa of Avila that is movingly juxtaposed with a brutal narrative of his addiction. A failed love affair generates the screenplay for an imaginary film noir and a breathtaking and subversive reading of noir's S/M subtext. Trachtenberg summons up the scalding shame of being cursed by his dying father, the grief and tenderness of singing to his dying mother.