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 famousand infamoustattoo customers and artists, Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos is a raunchy, provocative look at a forgotten subculture.

Contents
Foreword

• Introduction
• From Academia to Skidrow
• A Cut-Throat World
• Dr. Kinsey (Prometheus) and the Shop
• Sex and the Tattoo: Motivations
• The Folklore of Tattooing
• The Clientele
• Barnacles and Leeches
• Excuses--Mine and Theirs, Before and After
• Masters, Methods, and Maladies
• Art and the Tattoo
• The Tattooist and His World
• The Vanishing Art . . . ?
• Appendix A: A Brief Historical Sketch of Tattooing
• Appendix B: A Note on the Literature of Tattooing
• Index