7 Tattoos

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…