Help An IAMer With A Project! C’mon, Do It.


(Scarification comes from Ze in Milan, Italy.)

Unrelated to the above photo, Clara recently wrote in about a project she’s putting together for school, which sounds like it could be pretty great, but she needs help from YOU. Yes, YOU. Take it away, Clara!

Dear BME members,

I am a student in Hong Kong working on a video documentary about the health, safety and ethical issues of tattoos and piercings.

As this is a project on body modification, I would like the members of BME to help me by sending me pictures or videos of the following. Basically, if you have any of these photos/videos in pretty decent quality for a DVD, hanging around in your hard-drive…

******

Tattoo problems
– Scarred up DIY tattoos.
– Faded DIY tattoos.
– Tattoos with blowouts. Example.
– Name tattoos with the outline of another tattoo waiting to be filled in. Example.
– Tattoos after laser removal. Example.

Problem piercings
– Rejecting piercings. Navel, eyebrow, surface…etc.
– Badly done piercings. You know when a client comes in complaining about a piercing done down the road in that shady store? Example 1, 2.

Piercing gun horrors
– Hugely swollen up, infected, or embedded gunned piercings. The grosser the better. Example 1, 2, 4, 5, 5, 6.

Well healed tattoos/piercings
– Tattoos/piercings that have been done correctly to help my audience distinguish the difference between a poorly and a well done piercing/tattoo. Ear (all kinds), navels, eyebrows, tongues, labrets, surface…etc. Tattooists/piercers, this is your time to shine! Send me your portfolio!

Jewelry
– Your studio’s jewelry display.
– Anatometal surface bars.
– BCRs, Curved barbells, Straight barbells.
– Internal & external threading jewelry, placed side by side for a comparison.
– Substandard jewelry. Example 1, 2, 3.

Studios/Equipment
– Your studio’s layout (reception, sterilising room, piercing/tattoo room.)
– Your studio’s logo.
– Clamps
– Needles (sharps and cannulas.)
– Tattoo machines.

Sterilisation and disinfection
– Autoclaves.
– Ultrasonic cleaners.
– Bagged up tools.

Animations
– If there are any 3D animators on BME with too much time on their hands, helping me create animations in HD quality will be very, very much appreciated.
I will need a few of these, showing the insertation and removal of BCRs, Curved/straight barbells (internal & external threading), and the mechanisms of an ear piercing stud. Anyone who would like to help me, please contact me at [email protected]

Videos
– Videos of anything piercing/tattooing related. Must be in DVD quality or higher though. Anyone who would like to help me, please contact me at [email protected] to make arrangements.

******

My final video will be in standard DVD quality, where the resolution will be 720 x 576. To allow me some “space” to zoom in/out, or pan sideways without affecting the resolution, I would appreciate it if you can send in your pictures/videos in as high a resolution as possible.

Please email them to [email protected] Or, if the file(s) are too large, you can compress them into .rar or .zip, and upload them to Mediafire.com.

Please only send photos/vids that you own (you should be in the photo/vid, or you must have taken the photo/vid yourself.) Please send them to me with your full name and your city of residence. Your name and city of residence will be used in the credits, whilst your email will be kept confidential. By emailing me picture(s) and/or video(s), you are agreeing to let me use your videos/pictures in my school project, and I have the right to edit or make changes to them as I deem suitable.

Please note, I will not use genital or nipple (male AND female) photos/videos as this is a school project.

Thank you BME. I hope that this is something the whole BME community can be involved in.

Much appreciated, Clara Chan. (IAM: fuck_life)

Questions/comments? Email me.

Eyebrow Removal! Controversy! Update!


So you all probably remember this little romp in the Internet hay from last week, wherein Brandon had one of his eyebrows completely removed, and much was made of whether or not such a procedure would heal properly. Well, the preliminary results are in! The above image is after one week, and after the jump, check out three weeks’ worth of progress.

We’ll do our best to keep you updated as the healing continues.

Full Eyebrow Removal


If there’s one thing you learn by reading BME every day, it’s that the human body is incredibly, impossibly resilient. We feature body rites and experiments with pain that some people find cringe-worthy, but the lesson, more often than not? Our bodies work very hard to take care of us, and even things that, by all accounts, seem dangerous or ill-advised, can heal perfectly well.

This is not to pass judgment on the skin removal we’re seeing here, but it’s an example of a procedure that, probably more than a lot of body modification procedures, would seem unnecessary and dangerous to the average the person. To hear the young man who had it done tell it, even the practitioner, Shawn O’Hare of Fillmore Tattoo and Piercing, was apprehensive at first:

I wanted both of my eyebrows removed for quite a while. Shawn kept refusing. Eventually after talking to Steve Haworth, he decided he would do it. We decided to do one now and one after this one has completely healed. We discussed all of the possible scenarios and risks and then went ahead with the procedure. It was pretty cut and dry. He peeled my eyebrow off and we bandaged it up.

At the very least, it’ll be very interesting to see the healing process on this piece. More shots, after the jump.

See more in Skin Removal Scarification (Scarification)

Throw Something Back


A while back, we featured this scarification by Ryan at Precision Body Arts in Nashua, New Hampshire — at the time, it was about three months old. The shot above is about two years later — the color has lightened, obviously, but the way it’s retained its shape and texture is pretty stellar.

See more in Ryan / Precision Body Arts (Scarification)

The Stars at Night are Big and Bright


It was about time for Cody to get his first cutting, Charles reckoned, and what better way to jump in than with a big ol’ Texas shoot-em-up notched right on the boy’s hindparts? Mighty fine idea, I tell you what.

(Cutting by Charles Finnie at Eye of the Lotus in Edmonton, Alberta.)

See more in Misc. Cuttings (Scarification)

Spooky Scary


Is the Ouija Board not one of the weirdest toys ever made? Regardless of its origins, the current incarnation is ostensibly for children, but it exists only to scare the bejesus out of you, right? And not even in the harmless “scary story” way — these things have tortured a few generations of people now by making them think they are literally being haunted by damned demons and such. What I’m getting at is, this cutting is well done, but since the person who got it done is obviously going to hell, I think we need another board game-related scarification piece to balance things out. I’m going to suggest Scrabble.

(Cutting by Russ Foxx at The Fall in Vancouver, British Columbia.)

See more in Misc. Cuttings (Scarification)