This is slightly weird. I don't even let my closest friends see my bare feet or exposed knees. But I wanted to put up a picture of my latest tattoo, which is on my left arm, of Buster and Annie from the cover of The Family Fang. Emily Effler-Bond is the amazing tattoo artist who took Julie Morstad's beautiful illustration and dug it into my skin. I can't imagine getting another tattoo from someone other than Emily.I am hoping the book does not fail spectacularly or else I'll always have a reminder of it on my arm.
I have two other tattoos and imagine I'll get quite a few more before I'm done. The other tattoo I have is of a Deth P. Sun image of a weird catlike creature playing a marching band bass drum. Underneath it says, "Please Be Brave". The other one is just some damn ominous blackbird. I very much like tattoos, not because I really want other people to see them (though that is nice), but because it gives me a point of distraction whenever I happen to look at myself in the mirror and see how much older/fatter/sadder I've gotten. It's a way for me, while I'm brushing my teeth before bed, to focus on a cat playing a bass drum or Annie and Buster with their bird masks and not, for example, why my skin always seems to have strange yellow bruises on it.
The book comes out on August 9th. I read tomorrow with my best friend Caki Wilkinson at the Sewanee Writers' Conference. I'll read something from the novel.
