Can anyone direct me to a pic of the star tattoo she had on her elbow? And what’s the story behind it?
From You Might As Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker, by John Keats :
once, at predawn hours, she dashed off with a mad crowd to visit the Bowery, a derelict area of ten-cent restaurants and flophouses and human wreckage asleep in nests of empty bottles and old newspapers in doorways. It seemed like great fun everyone to go there, and once there, she thought it would be great fun to be tattooed. One of her friends remembered the occasion well. He said that she and a young actor, Alan Campbell [later her husband], had the resident of a tattoo parlor inscribe small, dark blue stars on the insides of their upper left arms. “It had been a mad, mad night,” he explained, but next day she came more into her senses, and ever afterward wore long-sleeved dresses to conceal her mistake.
Not at all, said another of Dorothy Parker’s friends. He remembered the tattoo perfectly well; in fact, he would never forget it. “It was a dark blue or black star on her right thigh,” he said, “and she showed it to everybody.”
No so, said Beatrice Ames Stewart. She said that Dorothy and two other women had gone down to Greenwich Village late one night, and there Dorothy was tattooed with a small blue star on her left shoulder, “just below the shoulder joint.”
Whatever, there are probably no photographs because she didn’t want any.
Although you might try finding Dorothy Parker’s Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos, by Kim Addonizio and Cheryl Dumesnil for what they have to say on the subject.
samclem
September 12, 2004, 2:01am
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In 1975, Sheilah Graham did a story for Family Weekly in which she profiled “The Most Interesting Women I’ve Ever Met.”
She recounted how Dorothy Parker was one of her first interviews. Her interview occured just two days after Dorothy got her tattoo. The New York Daily MIrror wanted to know where and why the tattoo.
Dorothy replied, “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but the tattoo is on my arm.”
There was no mention of anything further about the tattoo itself, but it would corroborate the location.