Cyril Parks (Cy)

The "Electric Michelangelo" of the novel's title, Cy is a master tattoo artist on two continents. Born on the day in 1907 when his fisherman father perishes on the Irish Sea, Cy is raised by his widowed mother Reeda in a boarding house that caters to northerner workers suffering from tuberculosis. Cy is pressed into service tending to them, although he loathes their condition. In school, Cy shows interest and promise in drawing and Eliot Riley takes Cy in as an apprentice in his tattoo parlor. There Cy learns the ropes of creating art on skin and he grows adept at handling his demanding, oppressive, drunken misanthrope of a master.

After Reeda's death in 1923 and Riley's suicide ten years later, Cy flees to America, settling in Brooklyn. He plies his art in a booth Coney Island by summer and in the back room of a barbershop off-season...