Facial modifications are probably my favorite kind of body mod — and facial tattoos my favorite kind of tattoo — because they are by far the most aggressive way of pushing the an individual’s personal sense of who they want to be into the social reality. And inside facial tattoos, there are a million different ways of a person expressing themselves, but what I find especially interesting is when the individual does it in a way that breaks the normal rules of tattooing, drawing from outside it’s normal lexicon, or making decisions that are not the most obviously aesthetically acceptable. In this entry I wanted to show a few people who I think have done fascinating things with the way they’ve chosen to recreate themselves.

First is the amazing Rene van Assema (here with Debbie von B), who’s psychedelic facial work has been featured before:

Next another old BME friend, Jason Sand (who’s currently exploring the world on foot — contact him to get involved in a great project).

Another interesting facial tattoo is on Las Vegas’s Kirtus Blue:

Speaking of Blue, there’s Australia’s Paul Bluey:

I could go on forever, and I think I shall in a future post, but I’ll finish for now with Anthony Green of Cholet, France:

Adding onto his already epic chrome mohawk, chrome sideburns, full fire-and-water headpiece, and Wutang beard, Whitey Black just had Justin Mccroy of Under the Needle Tattoo in Seattle create this permanent oldschool handlebar mustache tattoo. He explained it to me saying, “the comical aspect is that ‘nothing says classy like a gentleman with a well groomed mustache’… and believe me I am not classy and far from being a gentleman!”

The tattoo is fresh in this photo, which is why there’s some fluid beading up on it (either that or Whitey just sneezed) — click the picture for a closer look.

While I’m talking about Whitey’s work, let me show you his scalp tattoo, also by Justin, because it’s so bold I don’t think I could live with myself without including it in this post!

Jester Mayhone (facebook.com/Jestermayhone) is one of those very rare individuals who has chosen to undergo a concept transformation — where the majority of his modifications all work together push him toward a new total-body artistic vision. Other well known individuals on the short list of those who’ve done include The Lizardman, The Enigma, and the late Dennis Avner. If you’d like to learn more about Jester and his art, both his body and his paintings, you can here’s an earlier more extensive post, but the short version is that he’s using tattoos and other body modifications to evolve himself into his vision of a jester.

Jester jokes that yesterday he had the “best Valentines day ever” as he headed down to see his friends at Tomah Tattoo who, after sketching various ideas on his face freehand (based on designs Jester had spent weeks drawing on photos of himself), decided to go ahead and set it in ink. Only the start of the linework is done now, but when it’s finished it’ll be colored in with random patches — the mock-up I drew is there to illustrate what it might become and is just a quick “what if” Photoshop job. For me the design brings to mind many themes — I see everything from Jester’s main theme to horror movie masks, patched-together scarecrow and ragdolls, and even a bit of Frankenstein’s monster!

Zoom in for a larger view. Once his entire body is done like this, he will be one of the most striking and uniquely tattooed creatures walking the planet.