Hello!
I have some wonderful news. We've selected the short stories and poems for our upcoming tattoo anthology. Here's the list:
Claire Askew - The needle: on being female and tattooed
Julian Bishop - Lobster
Harriet Bradshaw – The Magpie Tattoos
Maisie Brown - I thought I was enlightened and other stories
Meredith MacLeod Davidson - Illuminated
Daniela Esposito - Mayflies in Winter
Callum Henderson – Semantics
Liam Hogan – Chiaroscuro
Erin Hosfield – What’s the Weirdest Thing You Ever Tattooed?
Maria Jastrzębska – Iwonka
Di Lebowitz – Subversion
Louisa Mastromarino – Tattoo Trials
Karla Linn Merrifield - Of Lightning Bolts and a Palm Tree
Elizabeth Turner – FU
Michał Kamil Piotrowski – Tattoo poem
Sabrina Wolfe – Skin Deep
Valerie Bence – Tatu – to puncture, to mark, to strike
Thank you all for sending your work. It was an honour to read your work. It came from all around the world - from England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Czechia, Italy, Poland, India, USA, Nigeria, and China. I think there may have been a few more, it was hard to keep track after a while, but thank you all very much for taking the time to send your stories and poems.
In the end we selected the work of 17 writers. It is a mix of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and two essays. Some of the themes (in addition to tattoos) within this collection include identity, body image, class and others, but I think most of all it was transformation. It seemed to me that the acquisition of a tattoo almost always pointed towards some sort of transformation in a person's life. Which is what I found most fascinating about this subject.
I can hardly wait to share these stories and poems with you. I'll keep in touch to let you know the release date. Also the cover image here is temporary (unless I get a flood of emails saying: Keep it! It looks great!) and I'll aim to share the final cover with you soon.
Writers - if your name is on the list above, I'll be in touch soon.
Also, many thanks to our readers (there were three of us in total) for helping to select the work. It was not an easy task as there were so many strong submissions.
Pre-orders are now available from Guts: gutspublishing.com/product-page/the-transformative-power-of-tattoo-paperback
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xx Julianne
Director at Guts Publishing