Product Description

Believing herself a daughter of the West, Karol Griffin took the myths of the place-and of the outlaw-on faith. When she walked into the Body Art Workshop in Laramie, Wyoming, she found what she was looking for: a culture on the fringe of polite society, complete with outlaw signature. Soon Karol was a full-time tattoo artist, an occasional outlaw, and a tattooed woman looking for love in all the wrong places. By the mid nineties, the West had been invaded by suburban culture; and tattoos had become a mass commodity of coolness, compelling Karol to go even farther to find the authentic outsiders she romanticized. She eventually hooked up with a real old-fashioned Wyoming outlaw, complete with felony convictions and out-standing warrants-which is how Karol wound up looking down the barrel of a gun held by a tattooed caricature of true love.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1000653 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-15
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
By age 17, Griffin preferred to "read about Frank and Jesse James than watch Donnie and Marie Osmond on TV. Goodness is often painfully dull...." Working at a photo lab, the Laramie, Wyo., native met the characters at the tattoo parlor next door, befriended the owner, learned the craft and became a tattoo artist there. Griffin injects her eloquent debut memoir with plenty of historical and social facts on tattooing and the West, with such passion and expertise that even super-technical details go down nice and easy. However, despite the author's purple hair, blond dreadlocks and recreational drug use, she never comes off as authentically wild herself. It seems as if she's executing a mandate to hang out and occasionally fall in love with bad boys (although the one she eventually marries-and divorces-isn't), the crowning jewel of which is a disastrous post-divorce liaison with a convicted felon who beats her at gunpoint when she's pregnant. (Due to "an unspoken western code of honor among outlaws," she doesn't press charges.) Thankfully, a clue pops up halfway through the book: readers learn Griffin's from a typical middle-class family whose conventional ambitions for her she is uninterested in fulfilling but which leave her nevertheless conflicted (she finally admits this during a heroin-fueled introspection). Griffin's book is ultimately about how rebelling against her family led to a greater entanglement in a more dangerous dysfunction. Which goes to show: goodness may be painfully dull, but badness can be just plain painful. Photos.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* This is one of those books that almost defies categorization. It's a memoir of an intelligent, creative woman who dropped out of college to become a photographer and who wound up being a tattoo artist, too. (She also, for a short time, shelved books in a library and worked as a phone-sex operator.) It's a memoir, but it's also an education in the history of tattooing, from the "discovery" of the practice by white people two millennia ago to the modern day (the practice was called "ta-tu" in Tahiti, along about the mid-1700s). But Griffin is interested in more than just history: she also explores the subculture of tattooing as it exists today. A surprising chunk of that subculture is located in Wyoming, and that leads the author into some provocative commentary on her home state of Wyoming, with special attention paid to the relatively recent popularity of body art. And the book is a personal story, too, as Griffin examines the bond we sometimes have with people who will destroy us (when the tale opens, the author is pregnant; the father, an ex-lover, is in trouble with the police and has a history of beating the mother of his child). The book does so many things that it's impossible to say which thing it does best. A remarkable performance, and one of the most unusual reads of the season. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
By age 17, Griffin preferred to "read about Frank and Jesse James than watch Donnie and Marie Osmond on TV. Goodness is often painfully dull...." Working at a photo lab, the Laramie, Wyo., native met the characters at the tattoo parlor next door, befriended the owner, learned the craft and became a tattoo artist there. Griffin injects her eloquent debut memoir with plenty of historical and social facts on tattooing and the West, with such passion and expertise that even super-technical details go down nice and easy. However, despite the author's purple hair, blond dreadlocks and recreational drug use, she never comes off as authentically wild herself. It seems as if she's executing a mandate to hang out and occasionally fall in love with bad boys (although the one she eventually marries-and divorces-isn't), the crowning jewel of which is a disastrous post-divorce liaison with a convicted felon who beats her at gunpoint when she's pregnant. (Due to "an unspoken western code of honor among outlaws," she doesn't press charges.) Thankfully, a clue pops up halfway through the book: readers learn Griffin's from a typical middle-class family whose conventional ambitions for her she is uninterested in fulfilling but which leave her nevertheless conflicted (she finally admits this during a heroin-fueled introspection). Griffin's book is ultimately about how rebelling against her family led to a greater entanglement in a more dangerous dysfunction. Which goes to show: goodness may be painfully dull, but badness can be just plain painful. Photos.
(Publishers Weekly )

*Starred Review* This is one of those books that almost defies categorization. It's a memoir of an intelligent, creative woman who dropped out of college to become a photographer and who wound up being a tattoo artist, too. (She also, for a short time, shelved books in a library and worked as a phone-sex operator.) It's a memoir, but it's also an education in the history of tattooing, from the "discovery" of the practice by white people two millennia ago to the modern day (the practice was called "ta-tu" in Tahiti, along about the mid-1700s). But Griffin is interested in more than just history: she also explores the subculture of tattooing as it exists today. A surprising chunk of that subculture is located in Wyoming, and that leads the author into some provocative commentary on her home state of Wyoming, with special attention paid to the relatively recent popularity of body art. And the book is a personal story, too, as Griffin examines the bond we sometimes have with people who will destroy us (when the tale opens, the author is pregnant; the father, an ex-lover, is in trouble with the police and has a history of beating the mother of his child). The book does so many things that it's impossible to say which thing it does best. A remarkable performance, and one of the most unusual reads of the season. (Booklist - David Pitt )