It feels like it’s always the same… All you wanna do is lick a boob, and then — BOOM! — some damn bird decides to roost on your tongue. This moment in frustration immortalized by Andre Cruz Tattoo (andrecruztattoo.com.br).
Category: ModBlog
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The Shaped Transdermals of MaxArt
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As I’ve mentioned before, Gabriele of MaxArt Body Piercing in Italy has been creating innovative shaped transdermals (to say nothing of his invention of the Skin Tunnel invention), starting with a cross-shaped one, and most recently a teardrop shaped one. Let me update you on the cross-shaped one first. I have to admit that I expected the skin to retract — I didn’t think this would be successful. But much to my surprise, even at three weeks in (which is when the two larger shots were taken), the skin rather than retracting, seems to be pulling in toward the implant. This is most likely due to Gabriele’s design decision of cross-drilling the transdermal (which you can see in the shots of the jewelry).
Most recently Gabriele has done a tear-shaped one as well, another piece of great design. Obviously some of these aesthetics can also be accomplished by putting shaped beads on normal transdermals, but these are much more powerful on closer inspection. Now all we have to wait for is the cheap knockoffs of his design — I’m already seeing horrendous clones of his skin tunnel that have none of the beautiful high-quality titanium machining that is typical of Gabriele’s transdermals and Skin Tunnels (manufactured by Veleno Web).
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Micro-Implants by Dysmorphic
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This star is one of the bigger ear implants that I’ve seen — you really couldn’t push its diameter much bigger without potentially running into problems. The topographically sculpted silicone star is about 15mm across, which was the biggest implant that Erwan of Dysmorphic in Lyon, France could fit in the location. The other implant pictured below, the question mark placed behind the ear, is also custom carved, as are all of Erwan’s micro-implants. Click either for a closer look.
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Hand-Poked Cremation Ashes Tattoo
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Former BME columnist Marisa Kakoulas at Needles and Sins just posted a fascinating article on a hand-poked cremation ashes tattoo done in a hand-poked dotwork style by Colin Dale of Skin & Bone in Copenhagen. Colin recently tattooed his friend Eric with Eric’s father’s ashes, mixed with soot to darken the ink, milled together in strong Vodka — apparently human ashes are very light and it helps to add an agent to make the tattoo more visible. Click the picture to visit Needles and Sins for the whole story.
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Encounters in Africa
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This photo is from two years ago when Florian and his girlfriend were in Kenya. On their way back from a safari they passed a Maasai village, where they decided to stop. This was their first reaction when they saw him and his stretched ears — perhaps the first time they’d seen a white guy with stretched ears, a practise that is all but dying out in their own culture. A very fun, friendly encounter that saw them dancing together not long after.
His picture reminded me — when Rachel and I were in Africa (an amazing experience) in 2004, in Durban we bumped into an older Zulu that made his living taking photos with tourists. As you can imagine he was a bit beat down by life, unsurprising given that he’d been essentially reduced to a zoo exhibit, turned into a curiosity for visitors due to his cultural background. So there wasn’t any dancing. He did however appear happy, or at least bemused, to meet a white guy with stretched ears as well.
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Prosthetic Inside
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Yesterday I was mentioning how amputees often use their unique anatomy to get great tattoos that only their body is truly suited for — here’s another superb example, Jason’s tattoo done by Yancy Miller of World of Body Works in Lafayette, Louisiana. Of course this is a design that has been done on plenty of people with complete limbs, but a mechanical anatomy tattoo is somehow much, much more effective when its design echoes the prosthetic limb right next to it!
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A couple more Kielties
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I’ve shared Patrick Kielty’s work a couple times before (most noteably this great handprint scar) — and the work of his daughter — but my eye was caught by a couple of recent additions to his piercing portfolio. First, a nasallang placed so high that it makes my nose hurt just thinking about it (although not the most extreme I’ve seen), and second, an absolutely charming double-heart-shaped helix piercing using interlinked heart jewelry.
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Fabric-design-esque Backpiece
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Most of the tattoo artists specializing in geometric designs seem to draw heavily from math and sacred geometry (often centered around swastika mysticism), and as much as I consistently enjoy that, I’m always very excited to see the boundaries of modern blackwork and neotribal being expanded with other influences. I don’t want to put words in his mouth — and I am planning on updating it soon, but much earlier in Vincent’s career we did an interview which you can read here — but in this gorgeous backpiece by Beautiful Freak‘s (beautifulfreaktattoo.com) Vincent Hocquet I’m seeing fabric design playing a role as well, and the textures and level work in the faces makes me think of printmaking as well. There’s more as well, maybe in the general layout, that I can’t quite put my finger on but very much sets it apart from similar “texture collage” tattoos. Great work as always. Zoom in for a closer look.
Update: Vincent just showed me some of the source artwork, a Mayan “Mask of Death and Rebirth” from Tikal, 900 AD. I love the way he’s adapted it for the tattoo.
This Maya mask shows the different stages of life as part of a never ending cicle of human evolution through life and the afterlife as it was understood by the mayas. The mask has three layered faces, each representing one particular stage of life. The inner face represents the beginning of life at birth. The middle face is the most important one since it represents the adult stage when the person comes into his full potential and most of his life experiences happened. The outer or third face represents the end of earthly life. This sacred time was viewed by the Maya as the end of one cycle and the beginning of another one. Death was followed by lavish preparations for the next life.
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Ear Pointing and Ultrablack Eyes
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In my recent post about Samppa’s ear pointing technique, I commented that his style is nice because it’s so stable — the ear isn’t healing under pressure or tension, so the healed result pretty much looks like the ear fresh in terms of shape. The more traditional method, at least in cases where more radical results are desired, changes a great deal during its healing period. However, these changes — the way it stretches the tissue into a new shape — allow for results that are unique to that procedure, so I don’t see the technique being superseded any time soon. These examples on a customer of Moscow based Pavel Chernishov (vk.com/pavel_keek, ANGEL studio) show just how much things can adapt in the healing process.
Speaking of Pavel’s work, this picture of a customer whose tongue he split and eyes tattooed has to be one of the blackest-of-black eye tattoos I’ve ever seen done. I actually lightened up the picture like crazy to see if it had been photoshopped, but no, it’s really this wild looking.
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I’m With Stumpy
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I absolutely love tattoos with a sense of humor, and it seems like amputees really have what it takes to sell a good joke tattoo. In this case, as featured on the US Marine Corps flikr page, ‘U.S. Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class Redmond Ramos, a corpsman, displays a tattoo that reads “I’m with Stumpy” showing his sense of humor Nov. 14, 2012, during the first Wounded Warrior Pacific Trials at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Honolulu, Hawaii. Ramos deployed with 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, to Sangin, Afghanistan in 2011 where he stepped on an IED, resulting in the loss of his leg. (U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Michael R. Holzworth)’
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