This article originally appeared in The Forward on July 4, 1997. The first tattoo, speculates Peter Trachtenberg, was the mark of God placed on Cain “lest anyone finding him kill him.” In other words, muses the author of “7 Tattoos,” “From the very beginning tattoos were associated with wrongdoing.” but that was not their only…
Wandering around Tel Aviv’s Florentin neighborhood the day of the third annual Israel Tattoo Convention, I figured I would encounter a trail of tattooed people who would lead me there. But inked Israelis were on every street corner and coffee shop; I couldn’t quite determine whom to follow. “In Tel Aviv, in the south, every…
My first tattoo, summer of 2010: Woodstock (not the festival, the little yellow bird from the Peanuts) sitting on a unicorn, both characters wishing on a star. It reflects the childlike innocence I hope to maintain. After I got it, I began to understand why people always say they “crave” ink: By the middle of…
Russian opera singer Evgeny Nikitin has withdrawn from the Bayreuth Opera Festival because of Nazi tattoos on his chest and arm. Nikitin, 39, withdrew days before he was supposed to sing the lead in Richard Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman,” after archival images of him playing drums in a heavy metal band – chest bared and…
Getting inked isn’t abhorrent behavior for Jews these days. There’s HebrewTattoo.net, a translation service that generates thousands of hits each month, and celebrity tattooists like Ami James, the Israeli-born former star of TLC’s “Miami Ink.” But Jews looking to inscribe their bodies with the language of prayer might be wise to ignore the cautionary (and…
…is the subject of an article in The New York Times.
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