Color cover illustration by Robert Crumb

For decades, Jonathan Shaw was a world-renowned celebrity tattoo artist. Over the course of his well-documented career, he was one of the most infamous and influential tattoo men on the planet. Shaw's client list included names like Johnny Depp, The Cure, The Velvet Underground, The Pogues, The Ramones, Marilyn Manson, Jim Jarmusch, Joe Coleman, Johnny Winter, Kate Moss, Orlando Bloom, Tupac Shakur and the notorious Great Train Robber, Ronald Biggs.

“Although known primarily for his work as a famed tattoo artist, Shaw is also a talented writer whose latest book, Scab Vendor, draws on his own life, vacillating between first person and third person to tell his story in this sprawling, experimental autobiography... The comparisons to Charles Bukowski are obvious, but Scab Vendor reminded me more of Hubert Selby Jr. and Henry Miller in terms of tone and style... Interspersed with vignettes from Shaw’s life (and) foggy memories of a chaotic childhood (“other kids got [the] Hardy Boys… I got Hieronymus Bosch”), Scab Vendor [is] a whirlpool of drugs and alcohol. The gritty, gutter prose is sharpened by Shaw’s gift for dialogue and sharp insight. This tale is one of shame, humility, and wonder at how it all happened.”—Publishers Weekly

From the publisher:

Jonathan Shaw's Scab Vendor: Confessions of a Tattoo Artist is a surreal, multi-generational roller coaster ride through the underbelly of modern culture, charting the course of a life measured by extremes, and all the people, places, and events that shaped that life into a survivor's tale of epic proportions. In its pages, Shaw takes the reader deeply, not only into the recesses of his extraordinary mind and adventures, but also into the strange and magical process of memoir-writing itself.

If truth is indeed stranger than fiction, then, as Shaw's friend and literary mentor Charles Bukowski once told him, much of this book would have to be lived before it could be written. In that sense, Scab Vendor: Confessions of a Tattoo Artist is much more than a fascinating chronicle of a popular outlaw artist's creative evolution. It is a multicolored, cinematic, modern-day Odyssey, written in blood, ink, and tears--a kaleidoscopic, visionary roadmap to the journey of the human soul.