As they do every year, a couple of weeks ago the Oxford University Press unveiled its Word of the Year for 2009, that singular word, phrase, or term that best captures the spirit of the times in the preceding 12 months. Among the entries jockeying for the honor of being declared an official word by the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary were such terms as "sexting," "funemployment" and, my personal favorite, "zombie bank." Top honors, however, went to "unfriend," as in the thing you do on social-networking sites when someone pisses you off (which is something we all should do from time to time; I mean, I have a couple hundred "friends" on Facebook, but how many of them could I really count on to, say, help me dispose of a dead hooker?).

Another word that made it to the finals was "tramp stamp," the pejorative term for the now-ubiquitous tattoos on the lower backs of party girls everywhere. Personally, I've never really seen the point in getting a tattoo you'll never see unless someone is photographing your ass, but it's become a fairly standard badge of adulthood for young women from all social strata and a fitting measure of just how respectable tattooing has become. Once the province of sailors, bikers, convicts and rockabilly chicks, now sorority girls, professional athletes and your mom are getting skin art every minute of the day and night.

Of course, this is not exactly a grand revelation, especially here in Coolsville where tattoo shops are a growth industry, operating downtown and elsewhere in full, horrified view of the Chamber of Commerce and doing a brisk business in high and low art. Still, for many of us, tattoo culture is a whole different world, arcane and profane, the province of wildcat artists who can render both obscene symbology and breathtaking works of line and color on their human canvases at will—men and women who can do what you can't and subsequently live lives you'll never understand. Sure, there's Kat von D and her crew whooping it up on TV, but like all "reality" television there's a gloss and contrivance to it. As in so many other areas of life, if you want the real picture, the grunt's-eye view, you need a book.

Jeff Johnson has your book. Journeyman artist, back-alley philosopher, veteran hellraiser and often-gifted writer, Johnson is the co-owner of the Sea Tramp Tattoo Company in Portland, OR (a great tattoo town) and has the stories, tips and wisdom to either drive you away screaming or suck you headlong into his world in his book Tattoo Machine: Tall Tales, True Stories and My Life in Ink (Random House, 2009).

Anthony Bourdain's indispensable Kitchen Confidential wasn't just a groundbreaking book for its glimpse at the dark goo beneath the starched-tablecloth world of fine dining, it also launched a new subgenre in tell-all books about the service industry, part autobiography, part exposé, part punk sociology. Johnson does much the same thing in his book. Here is a chapter about legends in the business and how the art of tattoo grew through evolutions in technology, materials, professional standards and good old-fashioned rivalry, from the early days of anchors and mermaids and "MOM" rendered thickly in the black, now green, ink on the arms of old Navy men to the sleeves and back pieces rendered with wit and consummate artistry in bold colors and subtle shades. Here are the dangers of choosing the wrong shop or the wrong artist, both aesthetically and medically hazardous to your health. And here are the pranks and revenge stories and cautionary tales about the folly of pissing off people with mechanical needles. My favorite is the one about the skinhead who shoved his way through the line on Free Tattoo Day and ended up with an R. Crumb-style African princess on his arm.

And then there are the customers, the con artists who'll try to scam free art by claiming the artist did it wrong, the nightly parade of old men who hit Johnson up for tattoos of Bill Murray, the gang leader who sat for a tat of his girlfriend's name while one of his boys stood by ordering a hit over his cellphone, and the creepy guy covered with the names and Social Security numbers of people who may no longer be living and asking Johnson to add to his collection. And then there's the cute punky girl with whom Johnson went home and barely escaped alive...

Johnson dispenses his fair share of chest-pounding and smack-talk, as is to be expected from a veteran outlaw fringe-dweller, but to his credit, he is also able to call dumbass on his younger self as he embraces the wisdom gleaned from years of burning and getting burned. He's a thinker who waited to write his book until he had plenty to say, an act of patience that is becoming increasingly rare in our current era of instant notoriety. Subsequently, Tattoo Machine rings true even when Johnson's stories strain credulity. Tattoo artists will find themselves nodding in recognition, and the rest of Tattoo Nation—even your mom—will find it a good, solid read.

John G. Nettles