The tattoo taxonomy — Ewell's amateur-sociological project

pivotal · ~Nov YDAU, residency (narrated as a "two-month obsession")

• When: during his Ennet House residency, ~November YDAU; narrated as a "two-month" obsession (see Dating notes on the span vs. the in-range window)
• What: Ewell's signature material. Amazed at how many Ennet residents have tattoos ("a majority... the significance of this datum is unanalyzable"), the white-collar attorney goes around interviewing residents and hangers-on about the circumstances of each tattoo, building a "dermo-taxonomy." His thesis: tattoos are permanent, irrevocable, "almost always gotten on impulse" — potent symbols of "the chilling irrevocability of intoxicated impulses," the intoxication letting the "tattoo-type-class person" fixate on the adrenaline of the moment and not the permanence that produces it. His class theory sorts the tattooed into headings: (1) young scrofulous regretless black-T-shirt types who show them off like fine crockery; (2) the numerous older "stoic-regret" veterans (women's names on jilted arms — Bruce Green's MILDRED BONK, Foss's razor-mutilated MARY); then a third category, Bikers (who bare their ink with no affect at all), and he debates making jailhouse tatts a separate "phylum" after interviewing Gately about his homemade blue jailhouse square and cross. He watched, "charted and cross-referenced," the poignant much-faded tattoos of decades-sober old AA men (Ferocious Francis's martini-glass lady; the terse PUSSY carried with transcending dignity). Gately, who "usually can't follow what Ewell's saying," takes to just staring coolly at him until he stops. These, "like first with the exact definition of alcoholic, and then with Morris H.'s special tollhouse cookies... then with the exact kinds of corners everybody made their bed up with — these were part of the way Tiny E. temporarily lost his mind when his enslaving Substance was taken away." Corroborated from outside by Geoffrey Day's dismissive "Poor Ewell with his obsessive tattoo charts" (endnote-scene n090).