"A fleshy, oddity-filled occupational subcategory"

I can't remember now where I first read about it, but Jeff Johnson's Tattoo Machine: Tall Tales, True Stories, and My Life in Ink was an impulse buy that didn't quite pan out for me - it is a good book, in its way, but not in my way, which I would have seen if I had looked at a page or two instead of someone else's description. I was expecting something truly gonzo and demented, with lots of grotesque details, but in fact it is more like something you would read in the New Yorker! More on Anthony Bourdain/David Sedaris lines, much less like Ken Bruen/Bukowski/etc. than I had hoped for....

Anyway, there was one chapter that I really did like - avert your eyes if you are squeamish about medical curiosities - these are my favorite three sentences, only the rest of the chapter is then mere elaboration rather than wonderfully grotesque piling-on of further examples - the chapter on oddities:

I'm not talking about the countless skin tags, warts, and missing toenails, or even the more exotic yellow, scale-encrusted dimple of an old bullet wound, or a gnarly third-world surgical scar. Boils, lesions, psoriasis, eczema, folliculitis, active volcano acne, blisters, whatever. These are nothing.

I'm talking about black sponges growing off the skin, flippers, stumps, spines that warped to accommodate a third kidney, hairy purple square-foot patches of alien flesh, a secondary anus.