Celebrating body modification culture since 1994.
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You might be thinking, why is Shannon posting a boring old picture of a suspension hook? I’ve seen that a gazillion times and BME’s got enough galleries for me to see it a gazillion more if I wanted. But no! This is actually an incredible piece of tattoo realism by T-DAN Tattoos out of Russia. Check out his stunning portfolio which has this and more here: tdantattoos.com/portfolio/ (thanks to Roo and Ala for the tip).
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Following up on the earlier post about tattooing colour over solid black tattoos, Sara Martin, a tattoo artist at Sacred Images in Bozeman, Montana showed me this tattoo, white linework over black. Actually, to be precise, it started as a red tattoo, which was covered up by a solid field of black, over which white linework was done. The black and white photo is the tattoo immediately after the white lines were done back in 2010, and the white lines are of course quite solid and opaque since it sits on the dead surface skin as well as the “mixed ink” living permanent skin layer that all the tattoo ink sits in. The photo on the right, the colour one, was taken today, about two years later. As you can see, the white linework has held up remarkably well and actually looks quite similar to scarification over black. Sara says that in parts of the white you can see the original red, but that it’s difficult to see that in the photo (and it may be something where you can only see it if you know where to look).
Click the picture to see it at higher resolution.
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If you are a part of various social networks there’s a good chance that today you saw this crazy coverup by Tim Beck of Freedom Ink Tattoo Co in Peoria, IL as it went viral today. This isn’t surprising, because most people would assume that you couldn’t do a tattoo this bright — and this light — over solid black. There’s been some debate on how this is going to look healed, with some people saying it’s going to disappear completely, even though Tim swears he’s done others and although they do darken a little, overall he feels that he can successfully tattoo new art over solid black.
Steve Truitt of Ascension in Albuquerquer, who is no stranger to ModBlog had one of those typical “piercer arms” tattooed solid black. However, instead of scarring over it or leaving it all black like many do, he had Roman tattoo a bold biomech piece over the solid black, with no laser removal or other preparation in advance. Here is how it looked right after they tattooed it.
And here it is healed, a month later. As you can see, it did get a bit darker, but overall it is still bright and bold, and you’d never know that it was over black. Now, I should point out one important thing — tattooing over solid black is very different than tattooing over a tattoo image. When it’s solid black, you have a regular canvas — the way the inks combine across the tattoo is going to be consistent, rather than having to compensate for the variations below it. So the counter-intuitive truth may be that in some cases it’s actually easier to tattoo over solid black, rather than doing a “normal” coverup!
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I don’t read Portuguese very well, but I will do my best to translate for you what it says under this photo of Filipe Espindola. It says, “Largo do Machado, todo dia às 19h30 entre o laguinho e a floricultura, laboratório de performance e corpo comático,” which I believe means, “here I am right as the laxative starts to work, about to take the world’s biggest dump.” A picture is worth a thousand words.
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Hey, if you’re going to make a clone army of naked men, best to give them matching tattoos, right? And what is BME anyway, if not the home of the naked tattooed army? In reality of course this is Stephane Tissier, head piercer and owner at Hold of Needle Body Piercing in Lyon, France (Photo © Studio 5.56).
While I’m showing you Stephane’s mods, I wanted to zoom in on his hands, because he has a pair of superb piercer/mod artist tattoos on them — a scalpel blade on one, and a piercing needle on the other, done by JC Sheitan at Screaming Needle (also in Lyon, which from what I can tell from across the ocean, is a real mecca for body art with a lot of superb artists in one region) and Tristan of Empreinte Bodyart respectively.
