Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos (A Social History of the Tattoo With Gangs, Sailors, and Street-Corner Punks 1950-1965)

Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos tells the story of an erudite professor of English who abandoned his job to become a tattoo artist (and incidentally a researcher for Alfred Kinsey). In the early 1950s, when tattoos were the indelible mark of a lowlife, he spent 18 years working in a squalid arcade on Chicago's tough State Street. The gritty, film-noir details of Skid Row life are rendered with unflinching honesty and furtive tenderness, and the reasons people get tattoos are analyzed with rare intelligence. More than a history of the art or a roster of famous—and infamous—tattoo customers and artists, Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos is a raunchy, provocative look at a forgotten subculture.