BME: Body Modification Ezine

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Celebrating body modification culture since 1994.

Tag: 3D Implants

  • Dr. BME tattoo on a “Dr. BME”

    Written by

    Shannon Larratt

    Loran Shumway, piercer and body modification artist at Eclectic Body Art in Olean, NY got a tattoo of one of the many variations on the classic Dr. BME logo on his nape, done this past Monday by Robbie Mills of Something Beautiful in Jamestown, NY. I asked him why this particular version and he explained that he bumped into this one while searching for the original artwork*. Since as a practitioner he enjoys doing lots of implants, “I figured the one with more implants was a better fit for me!” After the picture of his new tattoo is a recent implant he performed, a silicone infinity symbol (from Steve Haworth’s collection), both fresh and a week into the healing.

    loran-drbme

    loran-implant

    * Note to other searchers, you can find most of the basic logos by looking up “BME Logo” in the BME wiki, although there are many variations missing… The page is desperately out of date.

  • Martini-Glass Ear Implant

    Written by

    Shannon Larratt

    Speaking of small implants, another one I saw recently that really struck me was this little tiny martini-glass implant put into his fiancé’s ear by Brendan Russel of Tribal Urge in Newcastle, NSW, Australia. When I first saw it, I actually thought that it was a white ink tattoo, because that’s how it comes off in photos (I’m sure there’s a subtlety to the design that you can only see in person). The implant was hand-carved by Brendan, and is incredibly thin, just 1.5mm (a little smaller than the diameter of a 14ga ring), with the edges all carefully rounded to ensure it doesn’t irritate the sensitive skin of the ear — the only part of the body that you could put something this small into and still have it show.

    martini-implant-small

    And speaking of hand-carved martini implants, you may remember this piece which was featured in the ModCon book (so this is from the “early days” of implants). Because this was going in a much fleshier location than the ear, it’s much, much larger, and even at this size it barely shows in its healed state.

    martini-implant-large

  • Heart-shaped Forehead Implant

    Written by

    Shannon Larratt

    I really like this heart-shaped implant at the apex of Anka’s forehead, done by Chai at CALM Body Modification (calmbodymod.com) in Stockholm. Unlike most forehead implants — horns, ridges, and so on — which create alien or fantasy morphology, this implant is much more unique, creating more of an accent or character mark, the sort of thing one would more commonly see from a tattoo. The piece is a few years old in this photo, and was hand-carved out of silicone.

    forehead heart

  • Massive Oldschool Forearm Ridges

    Written by

    Shannon Larratt

    These sorts of bulky, visually striking implants seemed more common about ten years ago, so when I first saw these awesome megaridges done at Adiccion Corporal in Zapopan, Jalisco, Mexico, at first I thought they were old pictures. This impressive forearm ridges are custom carved teflon bars (a harder material than silicone, but much easier to hand-carve), with the large one being 12.5cm long and the smaller one 9.5cm, in 14mm and 12mm diameters respectively. Even though they’re quite large, these are first-generation implants. In the first photo you can see what the bars looked like prior to implanting.

    adiccion-corporal-forearm-ridges-1t adiccion-corporal-forearm-ridges-2t adiccion-corporal-forearm-ridges-3t

  • Mutated Hand

    Written by

    Shannon Larratt

    Here’s a great example of combining implants with tattoos. Hugo Ferreira of BIOTECH in Toulouse, France has taken some of Max Yampolskiy’s ring implants and put them into Noss’s hand, augmented with red tattoos that not only match the implants but his knuckles as well. I should add that the tattoos were there before the implant, making Hugo’s job much more difficult, but as you can see he lined them up beautifully.

    noss-hand

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