I am totally jonesing for the release of photographer and roaming explorer Lars Krutak’s new book “Spiritual Skin: Magical Tattoos and Scarification” to come out on Edition Reuss this September. Here’s another image to tease you into the same anticipation as I feel, from his 2007 visit with the the Mentawai, whose beautification includes not just the “titi” (their word for tattoos), but also sharpened teeth… You’d think sharpened teeth would look monstrous and frightening, but with a big happy grin like she has, they actually look terrifically friendly!

You know, I’ve been seeing so much great scar work every single day that I’ve actually been censoring myself to avoid flooding my posts on other subjects away. It’s just amazing both how much talent there is — at this point you can find several competent scarmasters in nearly every major city (and then some) — but how quickly the portfolios of the top artists grow. It used to be you were lucky to get a big piece every couple months, but now it feels like there are a growing number of people who are considering scarification first, before entertaining getting a tattoo. Here’s what caught my eye today, a gorgeous floral scar done by Brian Decker (purebodyarts.com) two days ago.

Ferank (facebook.com/ferank.manseed), a handpoke tattooist who I’ve written about here before, points out that humanity has always had a close relationship with metal, not just as an object of wealth that never tarnishes or oxidizes, but also as a magical metal with healing properties — Ferank recalls his grandmother being given gold injections for her arthritis. Longterm readers may recall back in 2006 when I wrote about Islamic gold implants, and there are also Eastern monks who perform gold implants for a variety of spiritual reasons. Up until the early 1900s, Western doctors would sometimes implant a small piece of metal near an inflamed joint, and even today gold nanoparticles are being injected to fight prostate cancer!

Whether you believe this is placebo medicine, spiritual medicine, or hard science, it is undeniable that gold has an intimate and profound relationship with the human experience that few materials have, so he set out to tattoo himself with gold. This wasn’t easy because gold leaf is far thinner than paper and disintegrates easily — if he had tried to suspend it in a liquid solution like a traditional pigment solution, it would practically disappear, so he picked it up the gold leaf with a needle grouping and pushed it into the skin, which seemed to work.

He admits it sounds a little crazy, but he honestly feels that his consciousness has been altered through this ritual act. The first photo is fresh, and the second photo was taken about a week after the procedure, at which point you could still see a bit of sparkle. The last photo is well over a year old. Ferank plans on experimenting more with tattooing in gold.

Ayreen of Octopus Piercing Studio in Zagreb, Croatia… As dangerous as she is beautiful in this photoshoot by Marija Buljeta Photography. There is a second photo after the break that shows more of Ayreen’s blackwork tattoos. Click to zoom in the first photo.