Taschen: 1000 Tattoos
Edited by Burkhard Riemschneider and Henk Schiffmacher
(Taschen)

Once again Taschen hits it out of the park with a great book. It’s new 1000 Tattoos is a little hardcover of thrilling pictures and history about ‘wearable art’. We get 19^th century engravings here, tribal body art, biker designs and infamous tattoo artists wearing their ink proudly. In usual Taschen style, the text exists in three separate languages here, interspersed in between some of the most arresting tattoo pictures you’ll ever see.

Taschen is known as much from books like this, ruminations on a subculture well represented by visuals as it is for The Big Book of Breasts or The Big Penis Book 3D . From architecture, to huge hardcovers covering specific cities to retrospectives on photographers to big coffee-table tomes on movies, comics and pinup art, this publisher pretty much covers it all. The sex books might give Taschen lots of recognition in the mainstream, but regardless of the size of the book (1000 Tattoos is a little hardcover), subject matter or even the popularity of a subject, if Taschen gets a hold of it, you know that they will publish a top notch book…as they do here.

Yes, 1000 Tattoos is not for every taste (as the Big Book Of Breasts probably isn’t) but once again we have here a work of art from Taschen and a good read as well as a good look through.