Celebrating body modification culture since 1994.
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Those of you who follow Rolf Buchholz (Guiness’s new most pierced man) on Facebook or watch the BME suspension galleries may have noticed that he does a lot of suspensions. What you may not be aware of was that these were part of a larger ritual — to do one hundred suspensions, using one thousand hooks, over one thousand days. He has just completed this remarkable journey.
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I’m assuming you can tell from the purple marking line on his face which piercing is new. Now, you might be thinking to yourself, why is Shannon calling it a Mantis piercing? Is he going soft in his old age? Because that’s clearly an Austin Bar, not a Mantis piercing! But where you’re wrong is that you’re not looking at one piercing (an Austin bar is a horizontal piercing across the tip of the nose, like a far-forward nasallang), but two. The mantis piercing is essentially a very strangely placed — but still essentially standard — nostril piercing, which also means that it has faster healing than the Austin bar in general. Instead of going out to the side of the nostril, it goes straight forward, and in a pair gives the illusion of being a horizontal bar. It’s not a piercing that would work well on its own, and while you don’t need as many piercings as this perforated fellow, it is a piercing that looks best in combination with other nose work.
This Mantis piercing was done on Nicola by 23 year-old body piercer Massimo Cortese of Wildink Tattoo Studio in Naples, Italy, and currently guest spotting in Ferrara. Done centrally, this piercing would be called a “rhino“, but off-centre Massimo is calling it the Mantis, which I think is a good name for it. Oh and I had fun joking to my daughter that if this person sneezes that everyone around them has to take cover because all that body jewelry goes shooting in every direction like shrapnel. But in all seriousness, I suspect that this piercing in part came about because this gentleman is simple so covered in piercings that they spent some time brainstorming for new places to pierce!
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This portrait of George Karakioulafis about to slash the viewer with a piece of broken glass belies his gentle nature that should be obvious from what I believe is probably the largest swastika tattoo of anyone out there. I actually just got a great package from George and the others at Dildo Studio (dildostudio.gr) with some awesome shirts and stickers that I’ve been forbidden from wearing around pretty much any family member. But I will sneak out wearing it late at night. Oh, and if you want to learn more about the rebirth of the post-Nazi swastika, do follow svasticross.blogspot.ca who recently picked up the animated swastika tattoo we posted a few days ago. Well, I have an early morning doctor’s appointment, so I will leave tomorrow morning to Rob, and be back with more in the afternoon. Thanks everyone for the warm welcome. Later days.
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As if you can’t tell by Haffie’s “post scarification glow”, “I’m not sure there is a happier customer than myself today!” His tetris heart design (which might look amazing one day filled in with tattooing one day in the future). I’m not sure if I should be a little sad about the statement that’s being made by the final ill-fitting brick that is just beginning to fall? In any case, this was done by Luke Iley at the aptly named Scarred Heart Body Modification in Leeds.
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I saw this nipple tattoo (the one on the left) posted on a friend’s tumblr blog, and not long after it was posted it was followed up by an angry accusation of being copied from the smaller image on the right (which the sharp-eyed may notice is on a friend who I’ve posted a few times). I’m not sure who the accusation came from as I’m not a tumblr user, and if it’s from the wearer, I want to be clear that I don’t think less of them for their moment of upset — it’s natural to feel this way at first. However, I think that it’s important to realize that now that the entire f-ing world is tattooed, it is unavoidable that people will have similar tattoos.
I have seen floral nipple tattoos and other decorated nipples since the very beginning of BME. They are an obvious idea that lots of people have had, because they’re a great thing to do. And one of the most obvious nipple transformations is into a flower. As flowers go, these are far from a line-for-line copy. I can’t tell you if the one was inspired by the other, or if they were both inspired by an even earlier similar tattoo. But I can tell you that there are hundreds if not thousands of almost identical tattoos to this that were done long before both of them. If we are going to accuse the one tattoo in this entry of having stolen from the other, then I think we can easily call both of them thieves many times over — and we can start saying that about the vast majority of tattoos.
One of the unfortunate things about the very wonderful reality that the tattoo community has grown massive is that if you want to work with traditional motifs — be it oldschool sailor tattoos, or be it “tribal” designs, or be it flowers — that you are going to from time to time end up with almost identical tattoos to someone else through complete coincidence (or ethically valid inspiration). When you get a small tattoo like this, you should expect that it’s going to have some overlap with other people’s tattoos — this is an unavoidable truth. Sometimes it happens because of shared inspiration, sometimes it happens because they were inspired by you or vice-versa, and sometimes it’s going to be pure “great minds think alike”. I can’t emphasize this enough — when you work with traditional motifs, it is unavoidable that you will eventually see someone who at first glance appears to have “stolen” your tattoo. It’s not the end of the world though — your tattoo is just as wonderful as it was before you saw its doppelganger.
Certainly you have the right to get upset if someone copies your large original custom tattoo line for life. But if someone just does something similar — for example, an anchor on a neck, or a flower on a nipple, or a blackwork arm — you don’t have the right to be upset or to accuse them of wrongdoing. I think if you let yourself find fault and trauma and upset in such casual similarities, you are asking for misery. It is not worth it — better to celebrate the other message this sends: that we are on the same team, and have an aesthetic agreement about what is beautiful.
(Click through to view the image.)
Edit: I wanted to also mentioned this nipple tattoo, which is more likely a copy, rather than just being similar. I think in this one’s case, one of the two was almost certainly inspired by the other. However, because this type of flower is common on flash sheets and is a traditional design, it is impossible to tell for certain unless someone admits it.
