A tattoo of a tattoo from Moby Dick

November 3, 2018 9:26 PM

What might a tattoo of the narrator's tattoo of the whale's dimensions from Moby Dick might look like?!

This question is both super specific and super vague. In Moby Dick, which is one of my favorite books, there is scene where the narrator tells the reader that he once had the opportunity to measure a whale skeleton, and then says he has the dimensions on his arm as a tattoo.If you are interest, the whole short, odd chapter is here.

I like this scene and have often considered, if I get ever get a Moby Dick tattoo, it will be something related to this scene (because it's great--the body as text, the body as code--this is my jam--and a tattoo of a tattoo seems pretty in line with Moby Dick as a whole). But this scene is so strange and so not visual that I can't even fathom what this tattoo might look like--the character's or an interpretation of it. I feel like can't be the only former English major with this idea, but trying to google for it obviously just brings up big ol' tattoos of whales and ships. Does there exist someone who has gotten a tattoo inspired by this particular passage? What might it look like? I'm more interest in a specific "oh yes, check out this picture from this tattoo parlor website" type answers. Thanks in advance.

posted by Ideal Impulse to Writing & Language (6 answers total)

Here's a doodle someone did of that page with the arm tat illustrated. This one's more of a ms paint quick sketch with some discussion of the measurements that might help?
posted by lovecrafty at 9:47 PM on November 3, 2018 [3 favorites]

You are not the only former English major to have this idea, and not the only one at a loss to visualize it.
posted by librosegretti at 9:50 PM on November 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

If we were capable of visualizing this, we wouldn't have been English majors.

I know you're looking for something specific, but this is what tattoo artist are for. Well, one thing they're for anyway: you can take them your idea and they can draw it for you.
posted by Orlop at 10:00 PM on November 3, 2018 [5 favorites]

What about researching tattoo artists of Melville's day and see how they drew whales? In his story, other whalers had encountered Moby Dick and other great whales and nearly killed by them. Like us today, he and they probably wanted something that was stylized and maybe, popular for the time. If it's one thing English majors do well, it's research.
posted by CollectiveMind at 11:33 PM on November 3, 2018

Based on tattoos from that time period the lettering would have been uneven and fairly large. Even if it was just a couple of measurements it would have covered his forearm. They weren’t doing delicate lettering like this back then (which, by the way, will blur to total obscurity in a few years).
posted by not_the_water at 11:54 PM on November 3, 2018 [4 favorites]

Google search for Whale Skeleton Tattoo brings up a lot, for example.
posted by coevals at 2:09 PM on November 4, 2018