The novel begins after Sara has been “found” by a Life magazine journalist who brings her back to New York City in 1969--30 years after she and her husband Philip disappeared. Sara begins to tell her story from a hotel room in the Waldorf-Astoria, reconciling her own physical form--an old woman covered from head to toe in tattoos--and other people’s reactions to her:

Yesterday on the corner of Broadway and 57th Street, a perfect stranger introduced himself to me and said, “I just want to tell you how very brave I think you are.” I was about to flee on foot (no small feat at my age), when the stranger qualified his statement, “I mean, you’ve done nothing to disguise yourself, you look just like your photograph in Life magazine. Ravaged.”

Almost immediately, Sara reverts to the past, telling of her birth in 1902 “on the Lower East Side, that open sore on the hip of Manhattan,” her immigrant parents and their migration from Russia through Eastern Europe, and finally, to New York City, and how she worked as a shopgirl in a windowless warehouse by day and took part in “Yiddish intelligentsia” cultural activities by night. Throughout the book, Sara weaves in anecdotes and explanations by way of her tattoos, attempting to convey the illustrations of her personal history, the drawings that so vividly represent her life.

In the midst of the Depression and on the brink of World War II, Philip accepts a commission to collect Oceanic masks for a patron planning to build a primitive art museum. The couple travels to the island of Ta’un’uu, known for its people’s hand-carved Oceanic masks and their elaborate full-body tattooing. One can’t help but to smile grimly when Philip proposes the idea to Sara and says, “I’m not planning on going native. I’m planning on you and I spending a few months of this interminable Depression in the South Seas making money. After all, aren’t you the one who wanted to run off and live like Gauguin?”

When Sara and Philip arrive at Ta’un’uu with their tents and paints and trinkets for trade, they are thoroughly unprepared for the harrowing experiences that await them. As their stay on Ta’un’uu evolves, and the hope for rescue dims, they begin to rely on Sara’s painting for salvation. Soon, her talents are transferred to the canvas of Philip’s body, and eventually, her own. "…My tattoos are my very finest work, the closest I’ll ever come to genius. As native as I’d become, I still clung to the Western illusion that if my art was any good, it would enter the ranks of art history and outlast my mortal body."

My friend Scott always says you should never believe a word you read in fiction, but I’m a sucker for novels that integrate good research into the narrative. And I have to admit that I took some pleasure in the literary fruits of Ciment’s research on South Pacific culture, Oceanic art and Polynesian tattooing, however, at times her commentary on these subjects sits flatly on top of the story, punctuating it, and not fully seeping into it. Similarly, her depiction of the ‘20s art world and political climate was also probably intended to be darkly romantic, but filled with the expected buzzwords, artworks and fashionable names of that period it ended up feeling tediously pedantic.

Overall, the balance of the book seemed off to me--most strikingly in Ciment’s choice to devote only seven-and-a-half pages to approximately 29 of Sara Ehrenreich’s 30 years on Ta’un’uu. Those three decades are practically anecdotal in comparison to the years leading up to them and the days that follow as Sara is whisked back to New York City by Life. Isn’t that where the heart of this story was supposed to be?

Despite the aforementioned flaws there are also aspects of The Tattoo Artist that Ciment nailed. Many of her meditations on Ta’un’uuan life, philosophy and art are beautifully rendered. And some of the best and most captivating scenes include the early weeks of Sara and Philip on the island, where the narrative finally serves up some gratifying cruelty and horror.

Ultimately, this is a story about being both lost and found, and coming to terms with the boundaries that define those states. Having effectively been plucked out of her life twice by circumstances beyond her control, Sara Ehrenreich is still trying to reconcile her place in the world. She’s drawn herself a map of her life and sewn it into her skin, but she is still asking the same question her parents had asked more than half a century earlier:

In the end, the only question that truly preoccupied them was one that, in my bohemian youth, I dismissed as a greenhorn sentimentality, and now, in old age, is the only question I, myself, ask: Where is home, and how do I get there?

J. Laskey is the child of tattooed parents. She lives in Brooklyn.