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

By Samuel M. Steward

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0918393760
• ISBN13: 9780918393760
• Release Date: July 1990
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 214 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.3" x 8.5"