Homeward Bound: Confessions of a Tattoo Artist (Book 2)

by Jonathan Shaw, Oliver Peck (Artist), Robert Crumb (Contributor)

Picking up where Jonathan Shaw's critically-acclaimed Scab Confessions of a Tattoo Artist left off, Homeward Bound resumes the story of Cigano, the tattoo man. Cigano continues his full-body tattoo work on a young acolyte, Jaco, who eagerly soaks up his tales. Homeward Bound continues charting the amazing course of a life measured in extremes and all the singular people, exotic places, and outrageous events that shaped it into a survivor's tale of epic proportions. In its pages, Shaw takes the reader deeper than ever before, not only into the bizarre recesses of his extraordinary mind and incredible adventures, but also into the strange and magical process of memoir writing itself. Homeward Bound is proof positive that truth is indeed stranger than fiction. As Shaw's old friend and literary mentor Charles Bukowski once told him, most of this book would have to be lived before it could be written. In that sense, Homeward Bound is much more than a compelling, page-turning chronicle of a popular working-class hero'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.

400 pages, Paperback

Published August 14, 2018

About the author

A legendary tattoo artist and notorious creator of trendsetting underground art, Jonathan Shaw captures the destructive addiction of love, sex, drugs, and demonic possession embodied in two people whose irresistible passions threaten to destroy them in this cult classic novel.

In the wild backwaters of Rio de Janeiro and New York, motorcycle-riding, nomadic outlaw poet Ignacio Valencia Lobos—known as Cigano—attempts in vain to curb the unhinged habits of his lover, Narcisa, a crack-smoking philosopher prostitute. Though he knows they will destroy each other, Narcisa is an exquisite poison he cannot resist. As they navigate the chaos of her downward spiral—dragged deeper by the gravity of drugs, burglaries, and violence, Cigano recounts a love affair doomed by insanity, dysfunction, and vice.

A genius epic of outlaw literature, Narcisa belongs among the works of such greats as Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Irvine Welsh, and Hunter S. Thompson.

Reviews

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved reading about Shaw’s adventures traveling through Latin America. Looking forward to the next volume of this memoir.