“Am I more qualified to write about tattoos than someone who isn’t?” reflects Nadal Suau (Palma, 1980) – with twenty one tattoos – who won on Tuesday with his work Curar la piel in the 51st Anagrama d’Essay prize, endowed with 10,000 euros. The Mallorcan left the question in the air during a press conference at the Condes hotel in Barcelona and confirmed a certainty: “Until so long ago, only characters from marginal backgrounds” and certain professions, “like now the sailors Now, on the other hand, it’s strange to see young people who don’t have one. What has changed?”.
As if it were a statement of intentions, the writer, teacher and literary critic collected the award dressed in a shirt that revealed some of the tattoos that have accompanied him for years. A rose, a heart, a swallow… “I have a total of twenty-one,” he confessed.
It started “at a late age, somewhere in the thirties, because I was looking for a physical seal that had just closed a process of vital change”. His choice was very thoughtful. A beetle designed by none other than cartoonist and illustrator Pere Joan.
“The first one is always thought of down to the millimetre, and this one evoked rebirth and overcoming obstacles in life”, explained the author, and he also acknowledged that it was the tattoo he liked least of all. “Pere is an outlier but the result was not what was expected, although I am not in favor of deleting him. I would never do that. I understand that a bad result is part of history”.
Far from driving him away, the beetle somehow encouraged him to repeat the experience. “I thought a lot about the first three. Then there comes a day when you get up wanting to have a dragon and you get one.” This led him to ask himself several questions: “Why did I need a brand like this and what was it that made me repeat myself? What happens to some octogenarians who overnight have the need to paint their entire arm? And on a more collective scale, what has happened in the last thirty years to make it normal to be tattooed?”.
And in fact, if the work of Nadal Suau does anything, it is a social x-ray of how the concept and vision of ink has changed in recent decades. In addition, “some periods of crisis” are hidden in its pages, such as the death of his father. Stages that marked his life but which he deals with in the book without losing the perspective to talk about the group. I also write about ego, vanity, individualistic culture and that idea of ??the tattoo as a construction of oneself as a brand, product and company”.
In order to answer all these questions, Nadal Suau structured his work “based on five tattoos that I wear on my own skin and which allowed me to develop an analysis”. Although, he goes on, “the answers are not unilateral, because there are as many reasons as there are biographies or ways of understanding identity”.
Will there be drawings close to your skin? “It won’t be from the Anagrama logo”, the author admits with a laugh, “but I don’t rule out adding one more to celebrate the award”.
