Ektopia

Body Type: Intimate Images Etched in Flesh by Ina Saltz is a newly released book dedicated to the art of textual tattoos. In her first ever book release, Ina has captured 192 pages worth of tattooed text ranging from simple partnership dedications to poetry to religious writings to the celebrations of typography itself and much much more. There are countless highlights in Body Tpe and far to many to mention them all. However, the typography chapter is superb. Included here are some real crackers including some stunning ambigrams such as balance. Each of the tattoos comes with some text from the tattoo’s owner, such as this (that accompanied the aforementioned tattoo) - “I wanted a conscious reminder of the importance of achieving ‘balance’ in my life. I strive to consciously and subconsciously align my thoughts and activities with who I am and what I want to do, ideally without conflict or guilt.” There are a few more ambigrams of various styles and many simple single letters and punctuating marks too. Of these, I found an amazing little “typographic ornament” called a fleuron quite interested. I hadn’t heard of a fleuron before so I found the now little used flowery mark intriguing. The majority of the book’s content has been beautifully collected and the text is appropriately deep. I guess there will be many people that don’t understand tattoos in general let alone having simple letters or streams of text as the subject but hey, horses for courses; if you like tattoos, typography or both then you owe it to yourself to check out these previews from some of the pages as well as some more info about the book. Oh, they are more or less giving it away for less that £8 over at Amazon UK at the moment.