queen of diamonds
I wasn't reading this. I wasn't even intending to read this. It jumped off the page at me though, and so here it is instead of something I was supposed to be reading (Wilhelm Worringer on the page opposite, for instance):
The Papuan tattoos his skin, his boat, his rudder, his oars; in short, everything he can get his hands on. He is no criminal. The modern man who tattoos himself is a criminal or a degenerate. There are prisons in which eighty per cent of the prisoners are tattooed. Tattooed men who are not behind bars are either latent criminals or degenerate aristocrats. If someone who is tattooed dies in freedom, then he does so a few years before he would have committed murder.
—Adolf Loos, "Ornament and Crime"
(Loos was a highly influential (pre)modernist architect and his essay was published in 1908)