Ah-ha!

At the end of class today we were wondering whether there are any sites outside of Shelley Jackson's main Skin site in which people with tattooed words could talk or connect with each other. Well, I found this. (And, to be honest, is wasn't that hard to find, so maybe others have seen it. It was linked on Wikipedia.) The livejournal page—A Mortal Work of Art—allows the tattooed people to set up a community, and it's cool to see how friendly and excited they are to "meet", even if only on the web. For example, look at "Rocks"'s intro and see the comments posted below of people saying hi. (And check out the joke at the bottom: "On a somewhat twisted note, although it's against the rules to get a word tattooed on the body part it describes (when it's obvious it's a body part like knee or wrist) it would have been a hilarious placement choice to put "Rocks" on your testicles. LMAO. Painful... but amusing." Sorry, I couldn't help but include that.) I think it's amusing, by the way, how "Rocks" and many others comment on how slow a process it is to receive the text and notification from Jackson.

I searched back to the initial entries, and I get the sense from the posting on this page that Shelley Jackson wasn't happy with creation of this livejournal because it allows readers to get a sense of "thematic possibilities", as she calls it, of the story. I'm assuming this was written before she created the footnotes page on the her Skin site, because that page does a similar thing. Also, I thought the drawing of the human body at the top of each page was pretty cool. Based on the pictures on the Skin website (see the word "country", for instance), I think the drawings are accurate representations of where people have the tattoos. If only I could zoom in and figure out more of the words so I could decode the story...