About a week ago I was having a chat with some friends about ideas for possible future tattoos. I mentioned the idea of some sort of typographic tattoo being that I love typography and I am a graphic designer. My friend mentioned this short story that a woman is “writing” where every word from the story is a tattooed word on someone’s body. I was so intrigued by this I had to look into it further.

When I first did a Google search for “typographic tattoos,” I got what you’d expect; a lot of images of people with random words on their body and such. Nothing really substantial. So I had to dig deeper to find out about this short story my friend was talking about. Along the way I came across something that people will either think is cool or just really weird.

Tare Lugnt (which means “take it easy” in Swedish) came out with the 3rd issue of it’s magazine a few months ago and this issue was entirely tattooed on publisher, Marc Strömberg’s leg! See in the photos above. It is very reminiscent of the 1999 AIGA poster that Stefan Sagmeister created for the talk he was going to give. In that poster Sagmeister had the intern at the time carve all the letters into his skin with a small blade. However, in time the words went away. Strömberg will have the magazine tattoo on his leg forever. Well, unless he decides to remove it. But according to the Wall Street Journal article published about this “skin” magazine, he will never remove a tattoo.

The text is entirely in his and his tattoo artist’s handwriting and rather than be precise about kerning and leading and justification, Strömberg decided that free form would be best. There is even a typo in the text which he considers charming and authentic. In the WSJ article he goes on to say that he was inspired by Shelley Jackson’s short story that was tattooed onto 2,095 participants one word at a time! *ding ding ding* I had found what I was looking for.

Jackson is a writer who decided to push the limits of what is considered a text and “publish” a story on the skin of 2,095 volunteers. The short story is entitled “Skin” and Jackson started the first word of the story — the title — on September 8, 2003 when she had the word tattooed on her wrist in Baskerville. Since then, she has received over 10,000 applications to be a word in the story. Her last status update of the project on her website was March of last year when the story was still not complete. I can’t find anything to know if it has been finished by now. Regardless, I think the idea is awesome and unique. Jackson states that she views those with the word tattoos not as carriers of the words but embodiments of the words themselves. When a person dies the word dies with them and the text alters.

There are some strict guidelines for becoming a word in her short story after your application has been accepted. You must sign a release of liability stating that the author is not responsible for tattoo-related misfortunes. You cannot make the entire text public since you will be given the entire text once you have submitted your photo proof that the word has been tattooed on your body. You must tattoo the word in a classic book font such as Garamond or Bodoni and it can be any size as long as it’s visible to the naked eye. The word could include punctuation which also must be tattooed on your body. If you do not like the word you were given you may deny participation in the story, but you cannot swap for a “better” word. If the word is a body part, it cannot be tattooed on said body part with the exception of the word “skin” of course.

Some people have posted photos of their words and you can see some of them in the above gallery. I absolutely love the idea of this and wish there was a way to see all the words one by one. I know we never will as Jackson states she will not use the photos of the words themselves for publication. Everyone involved in this project is essentially in a small group of people in the word tied together through this story that they are apart of. It’s quite amazing when you think about it.