SlingerVille Articles
The strange world of Baghdad’s tattoo parlors
Article by: Washington Post
July 24, 2014

— To get to Dante’s lair, you have to walk down an alley, up the stairs and along a corridor of a dilapidated shopping center in Baghdad’s central Karrada district.

Inside a dimly lit room there on a recent, sweltering night, I found a group of tough-looking young men and teenagers gathered around a comrade who was struggling to remain stoic despite the pain.

Dante, 24, our protagonist, was hard at work, drilling a tattoo of the Shiite saint Ali into the young man’s arm.

Photographer Max Becherer and I had come to meet Dante — with the help of our young driver, Osama — to see a different side of Iraq than its grinding political violence.

Of course, almost no place in Iraq is immune from the horrendous suffering that has plagued the nation for decades — first under the brutal rule of Saddam Hussein, then with the violence that exploded after the U.S. invasion in 2003.

Click here to read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the-strange-sectarian-world-of-baghdads-tattoo-parlors/2014/07/22/4b436b96-11c6-4a7f-9f3b-8ed9ddcf83c5_story.html


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