Accord­ing to Eva Tal­madge, co-author of The Word Made Flesh: Lit­er­ary Tat­toos from Book­worms World­wide, Kurt Von­negut is the big goril­la of lit tat­toos (a dis­tinc­tion he shares with poet e.e. cum­mings).

It’s not sur­pris­ing. Vonnegut’s humor and con­ci­sion make him one of the most quotable authors of all time, per­fect­ly suit­ed to the task.

Rep­e­ti­tion is the price Von­negut tat­too enthu­si­asts must pay for such endur­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty.

The phrase “so it goes” occurs 106 times in Slaugh­ter­house-Five, a fig­ure dwarfed many times over by the num­ber of hides upon which it is per­ma­nent­ly inked. Recur­rence is so fre­quent that the lit­er­ary tat­too blog, Con­trari­wise, recent­ly host­ed a round of So It Goes Sat­ur­days. So it goes.

The sec­ond run­ner up, also from Slaugh­ter­house-Five,  is the painful­ly iron­ic “Every­thing was Beau­ti­ful and Noth­ing Hurt.”

Those who’d rather put a bird on it than present an acces­si­ble sen­ti­ment to the unini­ti­at­ed can opt for “poo-tee-weet,” the catch­phrase of a bird who’s a wit­ness to war.  Cer­tain to con­found the folks star­ing at your tri­ceps in the gro­cery line.

Slaugh­ter­house Five is not Vonnegut’s only tat­too-friend­ly nov­el, of course.

Break­fast of Cham­pi­ons is par­tic­u­lar­ly well suit­ed to the form, thanks to the author’s own line draw­ings.

There’s also Slap­stick:

Hocus Pocus:

Cat’s Cra­dle:

God Bless You Mr. Rose­wa­ter:

And then there’s the infa­mous aster­isk, whose first appear­ance in Break­fast in Cham­pi­ons is pre­ced­ed thus­ly:

…to give an idea of the matu­ri­ty of my illus­tra­tions for this book, here is my pic­ture of an ass­hole”

Hard­core fans can can prove their ded­i­ca­tion by tak­ing a por­trait of the mas­ter to the grave with them.

Depend­ing on your tol­er­ance for pain, you could squeeze in a longer sen­ti­ment:

“I want­ed all things

To seem to make some sense,

So we could all be hap­py, yes,

Instead of tense.

And I made up lies

So that they all fit nice,

And I made this sad world

A par-a-dise.”

― Kurt Von­negut, A Man With­out a Coun­try

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Daz­zling Gallery of Clock­work Orange Tat­toos

Meet Amer­i­ca & Britain’s First Female Tat­too Artists: Maud Wag­n­er (1877–1961) & Jessie Knight (1904–1994)

Why Tat­toos Are Per­ma­nent? New TED Ed Video Explains with Ani­ma­tion

Hear Kurt Von­negut Read Slaugh­ter­house-Five, Cat’s Cra­dle & Oth­er Nov­els

Kurt Von­negut Cre­ates a Report Card for His Nov­els, Rank­ing Them From A+ to D

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Her play, Fawn­book, opens in New York City lat­er this month. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

Evok­ing the play­ful grotesques of Shel Sil­ver­stein, the goth­ic gloom of Neil Gaiman’s Sand­man comics, the occult beau­ty of the Rid­er-Waite tarot deck, and the hid­den hor­rors of H.P. Love­craft, Har­ry Clarke’s illus­tra­tions for a 1926 edi­tion of Goethe’s Faust are said to have inspired the psy­che­del­ic imagery of the 60s. And one can eas­i­ly see why Clarke’s dis­turb­ing yet ele­gant images would appeal to peo­ple seek­ing altered states of con­scious­ness. Clarke, born in Dublin in 1889, came to promi­nence as an illus­tra­tor of imag­i­na­tive literature—by Hans Chris­t­ian Ander­sen, Edgar Allan Poe, and others—though he worked pri­mar­i­ly as a design­er, with his broth­er, of stained glass win­dows. Faust was the last book he illus­trat­ed, and the most fan­tas­tic.

Clarke (1889 — 1931) drew his inspi­ra­tion from the Art Nou­veau move­ment that began in the pre­vi­ous cen­tu­ry with artists like Aubrey Beard­s­ley and Gus­tav Klimt. We see the influ­ence of both in Clarke’s gaunt, elon­gat­ed fig­ures and his inter­est in unusu­al, organ­ic pat­terns and orna­men­ta­tion. We can also see—mentions an online Tulane Uni­ver­si­ty exhib­it of his work—the influ­ence of his own stained glass work, “through use of heavy lines in his black and white illus­tra­tions.” The blog Gar­den of Unearth­ly Delights notes that “ini­tial­ly Har­raps, the pub­lish­er, did not like the draw­ings (Clarke recalled that they thought the work was ‘full of steam­ing hor­rors’), and many of the illus­tra­tions were fin­ished under pres­sure.”

Despite the publisher’s reser­va­tions, reviews of the 2,000-copy lim­it­ed edi­tion were large­ly pos­i­tive. Review­ers praised the draw­ings for their “dis­tinc­tive charms” and “wealth of fan­tas­tic inven­tion.” One crit­ic for the Irish States­man wrote, “Clarke’s fer­til­i­ty of inven­tion is end­less. It is shown in the mul­ti­tude of designs less elab­o­rate than the page plates, but no less intense.” The “page plates” referred to eight full-col­or, full-page illus­tra­tions like the paint­ing of Faust and Mephistophe­les above. Addi­tion­al­ly, the book con­tains eight full-page ink wash illus­tra­tions, six full-page illus­tra­tions in black and white, and six­ty-four small­er black and white vignettes.

You can read the Clarke-illus­trat­ed poem online here, with the illus­tra­tions repro­duced, albeit bad­ly. (Also down­load the text in var­i­ous for­mats at Project Guten­berg.) To see many more high­er-qual­i­ty dig­i­tal scans like the ones fea­tured here, vis­it 50 Watts and The Gar­den of Unearth­ly Delights, which also brings us more quo­ta­tions from review­ers, includ­ing “a neg­a­tive review of the draw­ings” that sums up what we might—and what those 60s revival­ists sure­ly did—find most appeal­ing about Clarke’s illus­tra­tions. They present, wrote a crit­ic in the mag­a­zine Art­work,

A dream world of half-cre­at­ed fan­tasies; the pow­er­less fan­cies of senile visions; mis­shapen bod­ies with worm­like heads; star­ing eyes of octo­pus­es and rep­tiles gaze like pon­der­ous sauri­an of the lost world, while half-fin­ished homun­culi change like “plas­ma” in forms unbound by rea­son.

That last phrase, “unbound by rea­son,” could also apply to the weird, night­mar­ish pil­grim­age of Goethe’s hero, and to the shak­ing off of old stric­tures that artists like Clarke, his fin de siè­cle pre­de­ces­sors, and his psy­che­del­ic suc­ces­sors strove to achieve.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Eugène Delacroix Illus­trates Goethe’s Faust, “One of the Very Great­est of All Illus­trat­ed Books”

Oscar Wilde’s Play Salome Illus­trat­ed by Aubrey Beard­s­ley in a Strik­ing Mod­ern Aes­thet­ic (1894)

Gus­tave Doré’s Splen­did Illus­tra­tions of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” (1884)

Alber­to Martini’s Haunt­ing Illus­tra­tions of Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy (1901–1944)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness