This week's list of recommended readings is twofold: authors who inspire tattoos, and books inspired by tattoos.

For the first half of the list, I asked Contrariwise's Jen and bookworms with ink's Marybeth to list a few authors who are popular on their sites. Here's what they had to say:

"In terms of popularity, I've found an enormous number of Tolkien and Harry Potter tattoos. Lewis Carroll's Alice seems to be very popular with female twenty-somethings. Kurt Vonnegut (in particular: 'So it goes.'), Sylvia Plath ('I am. I am. I am.), and Jeanette Winterston are also very popular, as well as Shakespeare and e.e. cummings," Jen says. "Religious tattoos are very common as well, I've found, particularly with those in the miliary."

Marybeth adds J.D. Salinger, S.E. Hinton, Charles Bukowski and Jack Kerouac, "I figure they show up a lot because a lot of people in the early to mid 20s tattoo age bracket are big fans of their work," she says.