BME: Body Modification Ezine

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Celebrating body modification culture since 1994.

Category: ModBlog

  • Pointing versus Shaping

    Written by

    Shannon Larratt

    I wanted to highlight and contrast two very different procedure styles of getting “elf ears” from two talented artists. In the ear on the left, done by Brian Decker (purebodyarts.com) you’ll see a traditional ear pointing procedure pushed to it’s max, giving quite a radical point — very long and pronounced. The end result is quite alien and very striking — if you want to see a well-healed result, look at Tye’s ears which are featured in the last Modified World video I posted. The other ear was done by Samppa Von Cyborg (voncyb.org) — you saw the customer’s other ear last week — and involves a complete top to bottom reshape of the ear. The lobe is removed, the contour is reshaped, and a more subtle point is formed. This also results in a slightly smaller ear because of the tissue removed — I’ve tried to put the two ears roughly to scale.

    I don’t have particularly strong feelings as to which one of these ear styles I prefer — I like each for different reasons. The one produces a far more extreme appearance, and the other is more “natural” looking for lack of a better term… I think there’s space for each of them and I don’t one procedure replacing the other — it simply broadens the palette available. After the break you can see a larger photo of the ear by Samppa as well as both of the ears of Brian’s customer.

  • Starry Outer Conch

    Written by

    Shannon Larratt

    As absolutely lovely and quite discreet star-shaped implant by Lary (larypiercing.fi) in Turku, Finland. It looks gorgeous for being only six weeks old — as I mentioned in a recent posts, it can take up to a year for these very fine implants in the ear to settle and really be properly visible. The cute little heart-shaped daith is nice as well of course, but you can’t beat the subtlety of these ear implants — the sort of thing that must get a lot of double-takes from strangers on the street who notice it out of the corner of their eye, probably wondering if it’s something the person was born with, or an elective procedure, since I doubt that mainstream awareness of this type of implant is that common.

  • Humpback Whale White Ink Cutting

    Written by

    Shannon Larratt

    I have been watching this humpback whale scar by Brenno Alberti of BodyFactory in Trieste, Italy with great pleasure. First of all, because he’s pumped up the normal cutting over blackwork effect by a level by rubbing the cutting with white ink — I suspect this will be differentiated from normal cutting by the detail in the finer parts of the linework — but more importantly because I just love the design and it’s pristinely cut. By the way, sometimes it just amazes me how quickly scars heal — it looks so great on day three — but I suspect that with this piece the white ink is creating a bit of an illusion.

    By the way, I don’t have an ink rubbing of a humpback whale, but believe-it-or-not, but I have rubbed a humpback whale. Click the pic for a closer look.

  • Anarchy is the only slight glimmer of hope

    Written by

    Shannon Larratt

    My father mentioned to me that I’m putting a real posting bias on scarification photos these days — I wasn’t sure whether that was a reflection on my personal interests, or on the fact that there are so many people doing great work in the field. I want to say I’ll try and be more balanced, but I’ve never been keeping my fingers still when I see something that I want to share with the world.

    In any case, Christopher Lee Shelafoe, who permanently alters folks who walk into the doors of Rendezvous Tattoo & Body Piercing (Marquette, MI), sent me an update on Wesley Larson’s big classic-punk anarchy sign chest scar. Since doing it via standard skin peel technique, a red tattooed outline was added by Ken Jago of Dragon’s Eye Tattoo (Sault Ste. Marie, MI). Because of how light scars get when they heal (and this one is still a bit pink, with a wonderful Freddy Krueger-esque texture, and will get lighter in time), tattooing is an easy way to give them extra definition — for example, while red ink alone is perfectly cromulent, I’ve always liked (and was immediately reminded of) the scarred lettering by Azl that got two-tone tattooing added to pump up not just the edges, but the three-dimensionality.

    Here’s the anarchy scar both fresh and in its current state — click to embiggen.

    PS. I am also reminded of the nape anarchy scar posted last year.

  • Cale’s New Facial Scars

    Written by

    Shannon Larratt

    Cale Belford (piercer at True Blue Tattoo) just met up with Brian Decker (purebodyarts.com) and had this beautiful scarification done on her cheeks. The first photo shows it completely fresh, and the second was taken right after Cale cleaned it in the shower for the first time.

    If you look carefully at the first photo you’ll notice that it’s half cut and half electrocautery branded. I wondered why that was so before posting I asked Brian whether this was just for fun, or if it had something to do with the way the different techniques behave on skin — for example, strike branding can cause the surrounding skin to contract and distort significantly. He replied,

    Some of the reason was variety and fun, for sure. The “branding” was done with an electrosurgical cutting unit, which actually does little to no cellular damage outside what it touches, so the results are very much like scalpel cutting. The main reason I implemented the device is the ease of it. Scalpel cutting lines on faces is generally an annoying mess. The skin doesn’t open well and bleeds like hell. With the ESU I can pretty much shovel the skin off at whatever depth and width I want with no bleeding.

    As if you need another reason to choose Brian Decker for your scarification work, but I hope this illustrates the value in going to a scarification artist with mountains of experience. Just because it doesn’t require a lot of skill to give yourself a glorious papercut, it doesn’t follow that it’s also childsplay to create a beautiful and balanced piece of scar art. I will of course post in the future on the healing of this piece.

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