Johnny “Thief” Di Donna (IAM/BME, MySpace, InkedNation) is one of the most skilled and true artists inking people in America right now, and has achieved huge success in a broad range of very mainstream fields without compromising himself to that mainstream. Whether it’s designing artwork for Guitar Hero 3 or tattooing customers at his shop SEPPUKU TATTOO in Savannah, Georgia, fronted by Downing Greek Gallery, his raw talent shines through, and he recently sat down and talked to us at length about his experiences as a tattoo artist.

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BME: How did you get into art? Were you an artist as a child, or did it come later? I have a belief that all artists are born artists. Oh, I know people can be trained and educated and then work in the arts, but there is more to art than wiggling a mouse or working a Spiralgraph™. That vision to see into other places, that insane burning desire to work through the night, that notion that if you don’t work, you could lose your sanity… these aren’t things that can be taught. They separate Artists with a capital “A” from the rich kids going to art school and thinking they’ll be gallery sensations by the age of twenty. Art was always there, a God-given talent, and sometimes it’s strange talking about it in such analytical terms. It’s not unlike talking about, ‘How long have you been breathing, and who influenced you breathing from early on?’, y’know? BME: How did you first get introduced to tattoos, and how did you decide it was something you wanted to do for a living? I worked for fifteen years in various fields of art before ever tattooing. I spent years designing sets, screen printing, designing, art directing, offset printing, prepessing, and building art departments for gigantic corporations. My client list had been huge, working on everything from the 1996 Olympics programs for Reebok to sets for Saturday Night Live and everything imaginable in between. I always loved tattoos, but I had moved from New York to Florida in the late eighties just before the tattoo renaissance would really reshape the fabric of the scene. Florida tattoos were horrible and I was poor, so no tattoos for me anyway. I had many opportunities to scratch, and I blew them off. People would stop me in the middle of the night, out in Ybor City in Tampa, wheat pasting flyers for concerts, and they would be like, “Man! You’re that guy! You do that fanzine! You’re the THIEF! Man, you need to do my tattoos!” And people would start taking off their clothes and explaining in detail what they wanted… which is alluring when it’s some killer babe. But, I’m checking out area shops, and this was back when Florida was in lock down, arresting 2 Live Crew for obscenity lyrics, arresting Michael Diana for drawing and things like that. I’m thinking, man, it must be really hard to own a tattoo shop, with all these religious freaks trying to close you down, and all the ostracization heaped on them, so without knowing how much that I was doing the right thing by them, I always turned down those kinds of offers. Fast forward to 1999, when I’m putting my ex through school, and working fourteen hours a day to do it, while all my other friends are creating posters for bands and blowing up in the underground. Knowing that I was dying inside, my ex bought me a starter kit for my thirtieth birthday. One of my good friends was also an employee, Mike Martin, now of Engine House 13, a screen print shop in Columbus. Formerly a trained tattooist from Ohio, he was tattooing outlaw style in Myrtle Beach during the tattoo prohibition. He threw a party featuring nine bands, a custom hot rod show, and me tattooing illegally on anyone stupid enough to sacrifice some skin. (Incidentally, I still tattoo these people for free to this day as a thank you). We called it the Lo Down Ho Down, and there’s a poster we designed for the show published in the ‘Art of Modern Rock’ (by Paul Grushkin and Dennis King, Chronicle Books), my tattoo baptism enshrined for posterity. After playing around with it enough to get the fever, under Mike’s watchful eyes, of course, I realized that tattooing is no hobby. It’s a 24/7 lifestyle commitment. I started doing crazy amounts of research, and testing the waters. Did I want, at age thirty and with fifteen years of experience, to leave a $60K a year job with full bennies in NYC to go scrub someone’s toilets to maybe become a tattoo guy? I interviewed Paul Booth, Shotsie Gorman, and Brian Everett for our online fanzine, the Black Market Manifesto. They’re great interviews, but I was really picking their brains about their career choices. I attended lectures at the Museum of Natural History on Body Arts through history, given by Hanky Panky, Don Ed Hardy, Chuck Eldrich, Lyle Tuttle, and a number of masters. I went to as many conventions as I could and started taking seminars. I collected more and more tattoos, and started trading work with some of the artists at their invite, one of which was IAM member Johann Florendo of Queens, which was really flattering. I finally applied for a job with one of the top studios in the tri-state area and was hired. It was a devastating amount of work. But the cool part was, once I started getting my chops, the old corporate job was bought out and sold, and the new owners liquidated 90% of the spots. Tattooing provided me with job security, ha! BME: What did your family think of you becoming a tattoo artist? My family has no idea I’m a tattoo artist, I have not spoken to them since 1992. My formative years were terribly abusive, growing up in NYC in the 70’s at the height of its crime wave, to underage parents who had no concern for me at all. Art and NYC go hand in hand; unlike other parts of the country, NYC loves an artist, the schools loved me because I wasn’t some thug or gang kid, and the only ones around me who hated me being an artist was my family. As a teen, I’d be kicked out of the house for painting, and forget it, when I started painting sets at a theatre, everyone was sure I was some sort of mezzafanuch… in fact, there was a point I had to sneak in to the city, as my drug addict step father forbade me from going, based on his illiterate fear that I would catch AIDS just by walking around the city streets and then infect and kill the entire family. My parents would beat me for wanting to be an artist. I had to fight tooth and nail for it. It’s one of the reasons why I get so passionate about art and so nauseated at bad artists, or people who think being an artist is an easy ride for rock stars, doodling all day, banging painting models, and going to art parties all night long. Bullshit, my stint as an artist hasn’t just been a few resumes worth of work, there’s times it’s been an out and out war. I’ve also tattooed in places where it was illegal, add that to the mix, fighting the government for your right to create art, and you get an idea of why I have no problem tearing someone up for sucking. BME: How did you learn and refine the craft of tattooing? Oh, that is still actively going on, my friend. Tattooing is seriously difficult, more so than any other medium, it’s a consistent challenge every day. Obviously, you’re working on a living medium that differs from person to person. As an artist, sometimes you really need to turn off the creative and concentrate on the application. It’s a ton of technique, some real hard and fast science. The art part of it is almost an afterthought. I made sure that once I was committed to the tattoo lifestyle, that I served a complete apprenticeship under a reputable master, (Mario Barth, back when he had only one Starlight Tattoo, in my case). Practice of course helps. Getting tattooed by masters and sitting at their feet and learning from them, of course, one of best ways to open your eyes and take things to the next level. I’ve been slack in that area: I was too busy making a lot of money for people who didn’t care about art or me. But now I work for myself, and this year I’ll be out of debt, and am starting to look to Europe and Japan to get work from my heroes. BME: Who are your influences as an artist and as a tattoo artist? My influences, jeez, there’s a book. I’ve had so many, it’s rough to condense it all, I’ve got interests as diverse as classical renaissance art to graffiti, and everything in between. Although I love inkwork, so I’m a huge fanboy of the Romitas, Miller, the Hernandez Brothers, Shawn Kerri, Rick Griffin, and anyone who can work only in black, and create a universe out of it. I love comics (Marvel, DC, horror, Japanese manga, punk, underground, independents) movies (sci fi, horror, foreign, film noir, animae, kung fu, samurai, monster, and really weird cult shit) art (nuovo, impressionism, surrealism, cubism, chiascurro, abstract, dada, low brow, pinstriping) posters (Mucha, Griffin, Kelley, Mouse, Kozik, Coop, Kuhn, Pushaed, Mad Marc Rude, and all my friends and peers) tattoos (Americana, Japanese, new school, grey, color bomb, whatever, it’s all killer)… and the tons of subcultures I’ve been involved with, like motorcycles, punk, ska, hardcore, zine publishers, literature, writing, sex and erotica… it all contributes. And damn, there are more and more talented bastards coming out of nowhere every day. Who doesn’t love Filip Leu? He’s a genius and easily the best tattooist alive today. I love Jack Rudy’s ethics. Same with Norman Keith Collins (Sailor Jerry) and Paul Rogers… ethics are constantly being eroded in this field and we could still use some of those old school values to preserve the craft for future generations. Bugs was a huge influence on me for a lot of reasons, I also feel he’s really underappreciated in the scene. Mike Rubendall’s commitment. Niko’s realism. Grime’s next level shit. Adrian Lee’s vision. Chris O’Donnell’s structures. It’d be easy to go on all night… BME: What are some tips that you would offer to new tattoo artists to become the best they can be? For starters, never think this is going to be easy. No one ever became great because things were easy. You think Martin Luther King Jr. was a great man because it was easy? This is not a profession for the faint of heart, for slacker laziness, or for piss poor gimme gimme “I DESERVE IT” attitudes. My marriage ended and I will never work in any other field because of my decisions; I made sacrifices that this business demands. Turn off the My Chemical Romance and start acting like a fucking man. (Girls, you know what I mean!) Second, forget about shortcuts. Scratching out of your house will teach you nothing. It will simply put money into the pockets of sleazy companies that will ship ‘tattoo supplies’ to your home. These companies are not run by tattoo artists, and their equipment is a joke; lousy ink, meat slicing machines, needles jigged by blind monkeys. The best companies will only ship to health department regulated legal places of business and will require you to prove it. In NYC from 1961 to 1997, it was illegal in all five boroughs to tattoo. This was from one single trumped up case of hepatitis that came out of a prison. When you scratch, you are breaking zoning laws, health department laws, and biohazard waste disposal laws. In Chatham county, (Georgia) these fines can rack up to six digits and jail time. If you get caught scratching, you could reverse the laws and have an entire county or state go back to being outlawed. You could unemploy every tattoo artist in the state. In the old days, which were not so long ago, apprenticeships were fucking hard. They were meant to be, they were supposed to weed out the fanboys and act like boot camp, college, and shock treatment all at once. In days not too long past, if you went to a shop asking to buy equipment, you’d leave with broken hands. In Japan — (*cue the ‘Kung Fu’ TV show music*) — the old rules were as severe as everything else in their culture. You didn’t get a bunch of small tattoos that had nothing to do with each other, you would have one single master design you an entire horimono body suit. This suit may take years to complete, and the relationship and respect between artist and client was critical. When seeking an apprenticeship, it was like that scene from ‘Fight Club’, which Chuck stole from the practices of Shaolin monks. A prospect would stand outside the temple, with no food, shelter from elements, or encouragement for days, being berated, screamed at, maybe attacked. If the prospect endured, he was allowed in to begin his training. Japanese apprentices shave their heads, like a monk… what they are doing is sacred to them. They move in and live with their sensei, their apprenticeship is 24/7. They will not tattoo for two, maybe three years at all. They will do everything from cook, clean, to anything asked of them. If they screw up, they are beaten. They study the history, culture, and sacrifices of all who came before them. They will draw until their hands fall off, become master calligraphers, and water color painters. They will study ukeio-e woodblock techniques, and understand the full range of mythology and religion descending from Shinto, Buddhism, and Bushido. When they tattoo, they will be using instruments made and handed down for generations. When they graduate, they lose their old name. They are adopted into the family, and given a two part name: Hori, which means literally to engrave, and also a new family name… like Horiyoshi 3… Now a family member, they will work with that master for at least five years, as a tribute back to his generosity. He may work with that master for the rest of his life, or he may find his own path. The artist doing the apprenticing is a world class master with decades of experience, who commands the respect of both an international clientele as well as artists worldwide. He has contributed to the industry in many ways, elevating the art form, improving technique and materials, and upholding the ethics, self policing the industry. This level of respect allows him to easily tattoo everyone from working class laborers to the highest level of Yakuza officers. When a hitman bows to you in respect, you are doing something right. An apprenticeship will teach you far more than how to tattoo. It will teach you VALUE for what you have, and have been given, value for your clients sacrifice of blood and skin, and value for how hard it was to get to this place in history and to not squander it lightly. BME: What are your favorite sorts of tattoos to do? I just love to tattoo. I love the look on people’s faces when they are just blown away. Challenging pieces, photorealistic pieces, things that are just a bit over my head are great, they teach me to stretch and grow. I love tattooing complex designs that my old boss would say were impossible, like wood cut effects, or a color portrait, mostly just to spite him. But sometimes, tattooing is as much about the ritual and bloodshed as it is about the subject matter. You know, like when people need a tattoo as opposed to just want a tattoo. I still love the basics of tattooing… I haven’t lost that first love of the gig. I get excited ordering supplies. I love unpacking a new machine or pouring out a bag of new ink caps. I love doing a first tattoo, a swallow, a sacred heart, a rose and a spider web… there’s still a rush from meeting someone you may never have met anywhere else, and having the chance, with a small clean tattoo, of changing them forever. I’ll tell you something funny: I don’t think I’ve tattooed any of my other art on people, like my posters. Yet, I see it tattooed by other tattoo artists all the time. Someone a state over did a beautiful rendition of the winged girl holding a baby skeleton from my Godsmack/Deftones poster… I was jealous! BME: What are your favorite sorts of clients to work on? The kindred spirits, naturally… people who know who they are and why they are here. Strong individuals who come in, sit, get a fucking tattoo, a tattoo that is 100% who they are inside, now tattooed on the outside, and go out to kick ass. It makes you feel like an armorer, or an arms dealer. BME: Least favorite? Ugh. It’s getting worse. The dumbing down of America certainly has wrought some damage, huh? I hate tattoos of inclusion. When someone doesn’t know who he is and is getting something to belong. Not belong to something he created or revolutionized. Belong to some vapid institution or brainwashing that the arts have railed against for centuries. Someone who doesn’t know what it is he’s getting or why. Like all these nautical stars on emo kids, never knowing why the word nautical is there, on a kid who’s never even seen the ocean. A tattoo that brands you as a group and a follower, and not as the unique individual you are. I call them an anti-tattoo. Or crosses. Ugh… I hate a cross tattoo. Nothing can be safer than a cross tattoo. Who’s going to get pissed at that? Praying hands. Doves. That Icthus fish. All Christian bumper stickers ripped off a pastor’s bumper. Do not get me wrong, I am not anti-Christian, quite the opposite. Remember that Jesus was crucified with thieves, it was a thief on a cross who was first promised the kingdom of heaven. But, you get someone who has to have the praying hands with the rosary beads and a dangling cross, with another big cross behind it, and a dove, and a banner with the word “FAITH” in it, you know, just in case we didn’t catch all that with the five other symbols in one tattoo… so, you’re tattooing this Bible bookstore nightmare, and he’s on his cell phone, talking to his wife. Then he hangs up and calls his girlfriend. WTF? Or brags about how he’s dodging child support. Or calls his dealer for a bump after the tattoo. These are all fakers who have no idea what they’re getting or why. But, they can go to Thanksgiving dinner, and instead of getting hell from grandma about their tattoo, she will most likely kiss it. I call bullshit. The Bible is 3500 years old, 66 books long. It inspired people like Mozart and Michaelangelo, inspiring some of the greatest works of art in mankind’s history… In fact, there are portions of the Bible that indicate that the arts are gifts from God, supernaturally given to us by Him to glorify Him, like the artisans who constructed the temple of Solomon or the Ark of the Covenant, or King David who invented a number of musical instruments… the BEST you can come up with, endowed with all your faith and supreme being power, is bringing in your friend, rolling up his sleeve to show me his John 3:16 tattoo, and say, “I like this. Gimme one of these?” UGH! I’ve had guys ask for a cross tattoo, and when I ask where they’d like it, they roll up their sleeve and all they have is cross tattoos. They look like fucking Arlington National Cemetery! An example, a kid came in, and he’s asking me about a tattoo. He’s like, “You know that verse, ‘My Brother’s Keeper’? That’s what I want, My Brother’s Keeper.” I’m like, “Sure I know that verse. Who doesn’t, it’s in the first three chapters of the Bible. It has nothing to do with being your brother’s keeper, in fact, it’s the exact opposite. Cain said it to God after he killed his brother Abel, asking ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’. Now, if you plan on killing your brother, then by all means… ” See what I mean? Here’s a kid who not only missed the point utterly, he has the whole lesson completely ass backwards. A country that is SO obsessed with God this and God that, but has no fucking clue what their own book really says at all. So, no. I didn’t spent twenty-five years of my life creating art to help perpetrate ignorance. Sorry! BME: If you could choose any three tattoo artist to be tattooed by yourself, who would you choose and why? Horiyoshi 3, Filip Leu, and Robert Hernandez. Because they are the best in the world, and I can only imagine the wealth of knowledge I’d gain just by sitting in supplication at their feet. Then Paul Booth, Grime, Marcus Pacheco. Tin Tin. Boris from Hungary. I’d always get more Bugs work. These are cats operating on planes that grunts like me can only aspire to. BME: What do you think about shows like “Miami Ink” and the mainstreaming and extreme popularity of tattoos? What’s good about it and what’s bad about it? If you were offered the opportunity, would you appear on such a show? I hate these shows. I do not watch TV and I do not currently get any channels, but the premise of the shows is flawed at the base. It’s corporate assholes who own and dictate the show, then package it and sell it like it was cologne or motor oil. They have no idea of the legacy of our history, or how hard it was to bring tattooing to where it is today, and certainly weren’t there when we fought for legalization. When money is the focus, art dies. From what I hear about the shows, they are long on drama, short on education. And I can’t stand the idea of tattoo faux pas being broadcast nationally; like when they’re doing set ups without any gloves on, wiping fresh tattoos bare handed, or Kat Von D is brushing back her hair with bloody gloves and just keeps on tattooing. And I know how cool it is to have Steve-O tattoo you, trust me, I’ve done stupider things with tattooing myself. We all have and still do. But why on earth present that to the public? That’s a right that tattoo artists have earned, to do retarded things like go to a convention and then tattoo each other in a dark room under the influence of various substances. Instead, here you have an unlicensed, untrained person tattooing on national television, showing how the tattoo community likes to break health department laws for ratings. STELLAR. Here’s a killer idea on how to make tattoo TV work: Pick an artist every week, someone up and coming, but not like some megastar. Let’s say like an Aaron Bell, a respected cat in the community who throws down like a motherfucker, but isn’t the owner of several clothing lines or a chain of McTattooshops. Send this person somewhere they’ve never been to explore both the territory and then to seek out the indigenous tattooing. Like some tebori hand tattooing in Japan, get some work in Paris from Tin Tin, or on a beach in the Fiji islands. You would be exposed to a different culture every week, plus see tattooing permeating cultures globally, and have the benefit of a sharp tattooist to illustrate things to the layman. It’s win-win-win, and would be really interesting TV, without all the fake drama or star fucking. Tattooing is thousands of years older than TV, movies and marketing. Please, corporate whores, stop dragging it down to the lowest common denominator. BME: What direction do you think tattooing is going in and what does the future of tattooing look like to you? Haha! I have an issue of ITA that is from 1998, with an interview of Aaron Cain by Dave Waugh, done while they’re on a golf course. It’s amazing. In the article, Dave asks Aaron the same question, and it’s comic how off he is on his answer. He had figured tattooing had hit it’s saturation point, and couldn’t possibly be more exposed. This was before any of the bike build off shows, tattoo TV, the glossy Madison Avenue magazines like Inked, or online banner ads for home mortgages being drawn by animated tattoo machines. So you want me to go on record like poor Aaron? 😉 I say, I think it’s a scary time: two illegal wars, prison camps, sanctioned torture, trillions in debt, fixed elections, suspension of Constitutional rights, illegal wiretapping, unemployment, falling markets, devalued dollars, the class gaps widening… this country is more apathetic than its been in ages. How many laws do these polesmokers have to break before they’re dragged off to the Hague? Seriously, Dick Cheney could rape someone’s mother on TV, and there will be some fascist pundit justifying it and saying what a whore the mother was and she was asking for it. I have no idea what is going to snap these spoiled, fattened, apathetic losers out of their funk, but I fear it. It’s going to be a second great depression, war with China, or a nationwide Katrina. It’s going to get really bad before it gets better. Tattooing will of course survive. It’s watched things like the pyramids being built and fall into ruin, it will definitely have a shelf life rivaling radioactive waste. And tattoo artists will continue to thrive; during the last depression, the entertainment industries thrived, even with money so short. I just can’t wait until the mall mentality shatters so we can get back to caring more about people than we do about stuff. BME: How do you feel about tattooing hands, faces, and other “public” skin? Do you do any screening of clients? Sure. The first and only time I called the cops was on a nineteen year old who started trashing the shop when I refused to tattoo a skull and crossbones on his face. He was just out of prison on a drug charge, was a father already, was beating the mother, (also a client, who covered up his name on her neck after having it for all of two months) and had only one other tattoo. Instead of seeing where I was coming from, that it wasn’t worth the $50 I’d charge him for the tattoo to unemploy him from 98% of the jobs in this country… he felt I was ‘disrespecting’ his manhood and started throwing our portfolios around, screaming he’d burn the place to the ground, and that I didn’t know “who I was messing with”. I was pretty sure I was ‘messing’ with a 140 pound teenage ex-con, so I called the cops rather than snap his femur with my steel toes. If the kid had some serious work gong on, some sleeves or a big back piece, and had a secure form of income, a trust fund, or a recording contract, then it may have been a different story. I take each client on an individual basis, regardless of the tattoo. I tattoo hands, fingers, feet, necks, and ears all the time. But the same ethics that makes us a quality shop doing clean work also makes us stop and exercise some small amount of social responsibility. BME: How often do you turn people away, and why? More and more as time goes on. We get a lot of people in and out who treat our shop like the food court. They want it fast and cheap and they want it now. When informed that the wait might be as long as thirty whole minutes, they stomp their feet and ask where the next nearest shop is. So, after showing them an entire portfolio of before and after shots, I send them on their way, and I don’t feel bad about it at all. We also get a rash of people who come in with a grocery list of things they need in a tattoo, several different subjects, a cover up, must go from hip to hip… no problem, until they tell us that they’re working with a $40 budget for several hours of work. Haha! Right now it’s just me and my amazing partner, Matt Lukesh, so walk-ins can only be done during the slow times. A LOT of people leave, thinking all tattoo shops are the same. The only real subject matter I turn away are blatant racism or white power tattoos. I have zero tolerance for that shit. But luckily, our clients for the most part keep us interested. We get to do some tasty things and they’re usually somewhat open to exploring outside their boundaries. I’m also sort of against all white tattoos, because I know how our own melanin will obscure even my best efforts and do not think I can deliver a quality product. And not a fan of black light tattoos. I don’t trust the company producing the ‘FDA approved’ inks, when you examine the release forms and find out the ink was developed for use on fish. Besides, how often are you in black light? Even the owner of a chain of strip clubs isn’t in black light enough to go through the pain and expense… more often than not, it’s a gimmick used by people who don’t know how to put in regular tattoo ink. Although, to my chagrin, I use three colors from the Skin Candy line of pigment that are also completely black light reactionary, as well as looking great under daylight, and not one single case of dermatitis or reactions. D’oh! BME: With galleries starting to exhibit tattoo and tattoo related art, do you think this is a good thing, and do you feel that tattoos are “fine art”, or are they “folk art” or “craft” or something else? How do they fit into the larger art world, if at all? This is funny, because our entire front lobby is the Drowning Creek Rock Art Gallery, with a full display of screen printed concert posters done by Jeff Wood and his impressive roster of artists, from Coop, Frank Kozik, Alan Forbes, Jermaine Rogers, Mark Arminski, Stainboy, Jeral Tidwell, Jason Goad, and myself. We’ve had a number of signings out of the shop, a few art shows, and display some of our original art as well. As a professional artist, you realize that the gallery scene is kind of a bogus creation. Gallery owners are quite often viewed as scum: many sell art for a 50% commission. 50%! Who else gets 50%? Loan sharks in Brooklyn are jealous of 50%! A lot of what makes a successful artist in terms of pay scales and exposure is a lot of whoring, ass kissing, and nothing to do with Art, capital “A”. The lines are getting blurred in as much as you have so many more fine artists taking up the tattoo profession, but are not stopping their former careers either. So you have tattoo art that is without any debate fine art. And it’s the kind of thing that will never provide a proper answer. Throughout the ages, the greatest artists in history were rarely the most lauded in their times. Some were shunned by critics but had commercial success, some so far ahead of their time that they failed to hit in any way at all until far after their prime. BME: Have you ever apprenticed someone? How did you choose them and what was the experience like (and if you haven’t — would you apprentice someone, and how would you choose them)? I have not, I’ve only been tattooing eight years. I figure I have another decade before I’d be ready to take an apprentice. Most likely my apprentice will be the hottest barely legal Japanese girl ever born, a demon possessed nymphomaniac sado-masochist and exhibitionist, with a hardcore fetish for larger, older, ugly Italian men. Luckily, I do not show a bias in my selection process. BME: If you weren’t a tattoo artist, what do you think you’d be? I was born an artist, I was doing art for fifteen years before I was ever tattooed. This last year alone I also did a number of concert posters, DVD covers, one real painting, and our work was featured throughout Guitar Hero 3, on top of running a tattoo shop 90 hours a week for 52 weeks. I would love to have the luxury of painting more often, and be one of those guys who can bitch about the gallery owners taking 50% of a $25,000 painting. BME: Do you plan on tattooing your whole life? Are you planning for retirement? Yes, I will retire. When they nail me inside a pine box. Or how about we get all Charlton Heston on it? “I’ll stop tattooing when they take my tattoo irons from my cold dead hands!” That was pretty tough guy; right? I have the words UGLY FUCK tattooed on my knuckles. I’m so in this for life. Sleep when you’re dead! BME: Have you experienced physical problems from tattooing (back, hands, etc.)? My partner does. The funny part is he is the skinny good looking one. He smokes like a fiend, eats only cheeseburgers, and gets winded opening a sterile pack of needles… he has all kinds of back pain, and is at his doctor weekly. Me, I’m almost three hundred pounds, the largest I’ve ever been… but my doctor declared that I’m “very healthy”, I have great blood pressure, clean lungs, and 20/20 vision. Thick rubber grips on my tubes and the occasional massage help keep carpal tunnel at bay. If I can get back in shape and drop this small child’s worth of extra weight I’m lugging around, I’ll be doing pretty well. BME: Do you find being a tattooist helps or hinders finding “that special person”? Does it interfere or help at all with your social/personal life? Being an artist is weird. I’m bitterly divorced… I’ll skip the play by play. When my clients tell me what a great catch I’d be, I tell them that artists aren’t stable people, artists cut off their ears. I’ll be forty in December, I have a hell of a lot of notches on my belt, and yet I don’t know one goddamned thing more about women than I did when I hit puberty. I have a suspicion that they all work for Satan. Although I haven’t really dated anyone in the scene who was a professional. I’ve hooked up with plenty of artists, but oddly enough they never wanted to hear about any of the things I’ve been working on, they just wanted a booty call. I guess as far as inspiration is concerned, my tongue has better uses than all this talking. BME: What are your feelings about the rising popularity of scarification and other forms of body modification as opposed to tattooing, which has a much larger modern history? I’m glad to see it. Apply everything I’ve said about commercialization and the superficiality of our plastic disposable mall culture to this question. Anything that gets us away from being drones and back to being actual humans again is just fine by me. BME: How do you feel about scratchers and lower-end tattoo shops, and their role in tattoo culture? I despise scratch shops. We just had two shops close here in Savannah, neither made it more than a year. One, the owner was a wannabe 1%er, a biker with no patch, who never tattooed, never drew or painted. Two of his artists left within days, the remaining artist had been fired from three separate apprenticeships from the worst shops in town. I’ll give you an example of the kind of shop this was. A cat walks in, knowing the owner deals heroin. He hates tattoos, has no tattoos, doesn’t want to see any tattoos, will never get tattoos. He scores, and asks if he can crash in the back and fix up, which he does. While out on the nod, the owner grabs a machine, and with no training whatsoever, just starts tattooing this guy, the same way you may draw with marker on a friend passed out drunk at a party. The guy comes to covered in scratch that looks like Helen Keller attacked him with a weed whacker… he can’t really go to the cops, how do you explain being tattooed against your will out on a nod? The shop is now closed, because the owner is in prison for drug dealing, weapons running, and murder one. This is a story I have to tell in 2008? Now, when I walk into the zoning department or city hall, and introduce myself proudly as a tattoo artist, is this what they think of me? Fuck that! Not to mention, that I’m sure there were days that we were sitting on our hands while they were rocking and rolling. They had plenty of clients all too happy to show up and get stoned… they would pimp that shop as the greatest tattoo shop that ever was. Except now it’s closed and the tattoos look like an experiment in flesh eating bacteria colonies. We live in a time when the Guy Aitchinson’s and Anil Gupta’s have raised the bar to staggering heights, yet these inbred assholes have helped keep people in the dark ages. It’s disrespectful… to all who came before them, to the craft itself, and to all the people they’ve scarred up. This, of course, is just one of the real reasons why we named our shop SEPPUKU. Death before dishonor, gaigin! When the health department comes in for inspections, I yell at them for being too easy. All that yellow paper tells anyone is that I know how to mop and wear gloves. What I propose, is the TATTOO LICENSE ROAD TEST! Get some prisoners, or kids who want a $5 tattoo, like you get a $5 hair cut at a barber school. The instructor comes out in a bad polyester shirt and a clipboard. He is going to test you on cross contamination practices, skin prep, stencil application, client comfort, lining, shading, coloring, bandaging, aftercare, sterilization and biowaste disposal… you get three hours to put on a nice clean tattoo, some well done lettering, bright colors, smooth blends, maybe extra credit for real toothpaste whites or special effects. If you fail, you go back to apprenticing and try again in six months. A photo is taken of your first tattoo and is laminated on your license as a testament to your skill. Testing is done once every three to five years. Your license is copied on the client’s release form with a check box to prove they have seen it before you begin work on them. Why not? The shit is medically invasive. It’s the 21st century. Tattoos are expensive. Imagine a body shop that painted cars like some shops tattoo. Not everyone needs to be Corey Kruger or Mike Rubendall… but if you can’t at least put in a clean rose and a dagger, find another career, please? If you want to suck at your job, go work for the DMV, people expect you to suck there. BME: Are there any times you’ve regretted your career path? That’s a tough one. I wrestle with it every day, as I’ve spread myself pretty thin. As I mentioned earlier I’ve been a set designer, a mural painter, an airbrush artist, an illustrator, a fanzine publisher, an art director, a screen printer, an offset printer, a digital artist, a concert poster guy, a wheat paster, a pinstriper, and a tattoo artist. All my peers my age are masters in their singular professions. For example, I have a passing friendship in Coop. He’s the same exact age as me, but whereas I’m only known in select circles and bust ass to make bills each week, Coop is world renowned and lives large in a Hollywood villa with his dominatrix wife and a garage full of hot rods. So it goes with most full time poster artists I know, and especially people who were tattooing for as long as I’ve been working. I started working in ’86, I still rent, I have only the slimmest of savings… if I had been tattooing for that long, geez, I’d love to think how far I’d have come. Sometimes I wonder exactly how much tattooing played in my wife’s decision to bail. It’s been seven years, and I’m still just a mess. A MESS! But on the flipside, I’ve had multiple careers, each one by itself is someone’s unattained dream. My resume is as long as your arm. I’ve gotten my hands dirty in such a wide variety of mediums and done some of them really well, a bit of a post punk Renaissance guy. Which is great, too. I’m a tattoo artist who can design everything I need from camera ready magazine articles to signs to business carsd to web sites, and is also in magazines, books, galleries and Hard Rock Cafes globally. This is no bad thing either. I never would be that one hit wonder guy, you know, like that shitty guy you hate so much but gets up so much for his specializing in fetish art, or some such shit. I’m glad not to be the ‘old school guy’, the ‘scary monster guy’, or the ‘hot rod guy’, or even conversely the ‘neo-classical guy’. I have some jazz in all kinds of fields of interest and can move in and out of them as a true professional. I imagine at the end of the day, I’d like to be well off enough to have no limits as to what I want to do with my life; for example, except for Hawaii and the Virgin Islands, I haven’t been off the continent at all. I have a lot of traveling to do, both geographically and spiritually. I don’t like stuff, you can’t take it with you, it’s just dust, after all, but man, if I had the freedom to create art with a capital A, that would be amazing. Give me some of that time I wasted on suicide, drugs and marriage, let me drop fifty pounds, and come back in five years and see what I can do. 😉

Shannon Larratt
BME.com

Every dead body that is not exterminated becomes one of them. It gets up and kills. The people it kills get up and kill.

After rejecting art school for a stint in the Navy, DJ Minor commiserated a few bad jobs at a tattoo shop near the base, and not long afterwards found himself tattooing tribal armbands on GIs… He just “kept waking up as a tattoo artist”, and the rest is history. You can find him at TastySquirrels.com and KantReed.com, and on Myspace as djminor.

Left: Done on one of the body mod artists from Joshua Carlton’s shop in Indy, Middle: the customer (a piercing apprentice in Texas) wanted a classic looking girl, Right: Earl’s foot, based on a painting DJ Minor did for another tattooer.

* * *

BME: How did you get into art and tattoos?

I wasn’t drawing portraits of my friends at age three or anything, but I was steadily drawing from the third grade on. I got into photography and technical illustrations in high school due to a very persistent High School Art Teacher. She got me all revved up about a serious art career — as long as it wasn’t photographing kids at SEARS she would be excited. Time goes on and I got a full scholarship for an art School in Savannah, GA, which I turned down for a trip to boot camp. This threw me into a different art reality of the tattoo parlors beside the base.

I would have been awesome at SEARS though.

BME: Were you also exposed to tattoos as a kid, or were the base parlors the first time?

My uncle was in the Navy and was covered with little demons, and flowers from all over the world. It was really interesting since South Carolina, where I am from, didn’t have legal tattooing, or many heavily tattooed people. When I got out of the Navy myself I was covered in the kind of tattoos that make laser treatment techs rich — but visibly covered none the less.

Living in the southern heartland didn’t really take well to a twenty-something all sleeved out with naked ladies and skulls. After a few bad job decisions, I decided to take a few hours break at a local tattoo shop with an artist named Crenshaw. Knuckle head thought I was still enlisted, and was crackin’ on me for my lovely collection of art. Next thing you know, I am rewiring broken power boxes and tattooing GIs from Fort Gordon with Crenshaw! I really don’t know what happened after that — I just keep waking up as a tattoo artist.

BME: Tell me about your first customer?

So my first customer walks in, and throws down with some seriously sweet red tribal arm band action. Oh yeah! After probably two and a half hours longer then he was ready for, we wiped off my glorious red masterpiece. The client base at the time was a lot different from the tattoo show watching public of today, a little less informed about current trends in magazines and the art behind tattoos — they really liked tribal and Old English tattoos!

Left: “Customer told me I could do whatever”, Middle: a gore whore model tattooed on Corey from Prick Magazine, Right: Jeremiah’s hand topper rose done at the Atlanta show right when DJ Minor got back from Hawai’i.

BME: Obviously your uncle doesn’t mind, but what about the rest of your family?

My grandfather was a Pentacostal preacher from the South, and my mom still thinks one day I’m gonna wake up and decide against them. Most of my family just doesn’t care anymore and it’s just who I am to them. The South isn’t like the rest of the country as far as ink and body mods go — I’ve been on the road for many years traveling, and I’m really happy to be away from the negativity from all of that Bible Belt mentality.

BME: Did you teach yourself to tattoo when you, I guess, just started doing it? How do you improve your work?

Tattooing was a sink or swim atmosphere and very intense. I quickly realized I needed more training, so I started traveling more and more until I just became a gypsy. I’ve been to every corner of this country I could, trying to learn more, and immersing myself into tattooing around as many talented artists and tattooers as possible. I owe any successes I have had over the years to my friends. Tattooing was a very private affair a few years back. The open ideas, and willingness to trade information of the last few years has really helped increase my tattooing technically. Lots of practice, and lots of technical critiques really have helped me push my tattooing to some very different places compared to when I first started. Fortunately the ability to tattoo more technically opened the arena to better art, so I worked on drawing and painting. Both mediums helped push the other. It’s kinda nice working with different mediums. You get stale and bored if you don’t. Recently, my wife has been pushing to work with oils more and more, and I’ve been on an art vacation the last three months while my the shop is being refitted.

I really get super critical with my work. I learn from each piece — little things to make it better, cleaner, and more crisp than the one before it, and improve on the next one even more. I try to outdo myself each time.

Critique from others is a large part of how I get better, so I don’t much care for open forums. You get a lot of washed out opinions on the Internet from people trying to be nice. I keep mine for artists I respect and that influence me. No matter how good you are, or think you are, outside eyes often can pick up things you never see yourself — whether it’s line weight, or contrast, you often just need a little extra outside opinion to help.

I also often try to incorporate as much non-tattoo art influence as possible too. There are so many possibilities with this medium that it just seems a waste not to.

Left: This customer wanted a tattoo with his spine cutting him deep, killing him slowly by bleeding him out, representing his struggle with pain after a broken back, Middle: Done on his buddy Stephen, a Def Leppard lyric (“Love Bites” — needs some salt), Right: Mr. Cagle, an ATL-area tattooer wanted something a little odd so they gave him a little birdie.

BME: You said you’ve traveled and worked with a lot of people — who are your influences as an artist?

Tattoo-wise, it’s always been Joe Capobianco, Josh Ford, Josh Carlton, and Eric Merril — guys like that have been on my radar since before I was a tattooer. Recently, people like Gonz, Jason Wheeler, and a lot more West Coast artists have been drawing my attention to more traditional themes and styles. I am looking forward to going back out to Reno and LA to work around them as much as I can. Currently, I am in Houston. Obviously Nate Beavers is a name heard a lot lately, and working down there with those guys was a pleasure. Rick Clark and CMFL are workaholics and make you feel guilty for not painting and working more. But, in this business, there are always amazing artists popping up out of the woodwork making your jaw pop. However, in saying that… I’m still gonna cut off Kyle Cotterman’s hands — maybe just his fingers, haven’t decided yet.

BME: Who would you choose to tattoo you?

Josh Carlton, Joe Capo, and my wife Jen — but I could name lists of people if I had more skin and time. Joshua is a quiet tattooer with loud ideas, and just slick tattoos. His Alla Prima Ink just really looks cool healed. I’d glady trade my black arm for a sleeve from Josh — might be time for some more laser removal? I still have a lot of open skin and I have barely been tattooed at all in the last few years… I would love to get some pin-up action from Mr. Capo. Finally, my wife is my new live-in tattoo artist. I love her work, and we are about to start my back project. I’m super-excited, but she is super-preggo, so I have to wait a little while longer. Once we move back to Reno, we will start on it.

BME: What have your favorite places been to work in your travels?

Each area I travel to really helps me expand. Hawai’i was still the most awakening experience I have had artistically, but the majority of my education was in Atlanta. However, every pin-poke on my map has increased my artistic vocabulary. I really can’t say enough about traveling — I made myself a promise, and this is my last year of being a gypsy full-time. I’m turning into a homebody as of late, so you’ll see me on the West Coast as a fixture not just a glimpse.

Left: Who doesn’t like vampires?, Middle: A dead Virgin Mary, Right: This piece was a collaboration with Nate Beavers at the Live Fast show in Houston where it won Tattoo of the Day — “Elmo wanted to get two dead bitches on him, so a lil dog skull and a zombie chick worked out for him!”

BME: What kind of machine do you use?

You can tattoo with a quill from a sea urchin with black soot from a fire, but I’m too lazy for all that. I still run electromagnetic tattoo machines. I haven’t given into the air machines yet, but who knows. Most of my machines are just random one-offs from different machine builders like Dave Riegel, Josh Ford, BadBrass, and what-not. I wish had more, but my buddy Jay in Atlanta talks me out of most of my irons when I go home for a visit. I have a huge ink rack from several companies, but ink brands don’t matter much. You just have to apply the ink to make a tattoo bright and solid. I got one of the fancy Eikon meter power boxes. I never really used the meter, but it glows all pretty in my booth.

BME: What kind of tattoos are your favorite to do?

Tattoos without a huge back story.

I am sure that everyone could come up with the most meaningful tattoo ever to be on TV, but there is nothing as fun or rewarding as doing a tattoo just because. No reason or rhyme — just a tattoo because it looks cool. I got an elephant shitting out a Dorito on my neck. It doesn’t mean anything but the fact that I have a nacho flavored chip on my shoulder. Most of my clients are pretty chill. I do a lot of odd zombie stuff lately. Not because I want to; people just like dead shit. Who can blame them?

BME: What do you think of those TV shows? They certainly push the idea that everything needs a long story behind it. Would you appear on one?

Hell yeah I would be on a show! I’d be the jerk from any reality show. I love the interest that the shows have brought to tattooing. I am just not really happy about the side they show on TV — any business will have drama. You don’t get a real sense about what is really going on tattoo-wise… “Come back in five minutes, I’ll have that sleeve drawn up and stenciled for ya.”

Um, yeah, sure. It may take a little longer in reality. Oh yeah… And you will not find a cat running around in my shop, or a tiger, or a bear, or even an alligator, oh my. I got a zoo at the house for that. The other shows like that Versus show were awesome, but didn’t have the drama the seventeen year-old MTV crowd wants to see like on Big Brother or what-not. Tattoo shows need to show more art — more conventions and art shows. Follow an artist from two weeks out till the day after a convention. That would make for a better show.

Left: This was done on a tattoo artist from South Texas who’s a huge fan of Peter Boyle from Young Frankenstein, Middle: One of many zombies, Right: This zombie girl was done on one of the shop regulars from LD Tattoo in Acworth, GA.

BME: Will you tattoo faces and other “public” skin?

An eighteen year old walks in and says, “Hey, tattoo this name on my neck…” Well, he probably won’t be getting tattooed. But if you have a fair share of ink, and understand the responsibility of a body mod, then it’s your choice. Don’t think there isn’t a price to pay. Walk up into any store with huge piercings or tattoos and you will quickly learn. People are less shocked these days, but sometimes, you still got to warn or educate a client before they take on certain work.

BME: Do you turn many people away?

Not too often… most of the clients I turn away are actually just referred to someone else who would be better suited for what they want. Most of my clients are here because they are open to my work already, so most often, people who come see me get me. If that Polynesian back piece is still on your mind, then I’ll hand you Ronson’s info and get you out to Oahu though.

BME: What’s the best way for someone to get into the industry these days? Any advice for wanna-be tattoo artists?

Be a well rounded artist way before you try to be in this industry. Make your own path, and don’t look for a quick fix.

BME: What do you think you’d be doing if it weren’t for having fallen into tattooing?

I would have to marry a rich girl to afford my Xbox addiction! Maybe a porn star… who doesn’t wanna watch a chubby guy wiggle on an ugly chick for fifteen seconds?

BME: Think you’ve found your life-long calling then?

Tattooing for my whole life? If this old body will hold up, I will. My tattoo retirement plan is a little lax right now, but my wife is younger, so I’ll just make her work when I get old.

BME: Is your body starting to give you problems?

Yeah, I got some nifty glasses — I look like an old man creeping up with my newly founded gray sprouting hair. My back is ok as can be from sitting on painfully flat chairs for the last decade. I would really like to see some major advancements in tattoo chair technology.

BME: Finally, what do you think about scratchers and their role in tattoo culture?

Trick question, right?

BME: Haha, definitely not… thanks for talking to us!

Shannon Larratt
BME.com

Inflated!

I first met my friend “Anon” when he sent me photos of his mineral oil injection which had, as they always do, gone terribly wrong. In his early thirties, his interests centered around body inflation of all sorts — saline, air, water, pumping, and more — but he had catastrophically deformed genitals thanks to his body’s response to the mineral oil. After hiding it, untreated for half a decade, he met the woman who was to be his wife and eventually had to face the wages of his fetish with her.

Ultimately, his story is a love story, and with her support, he went through a difficult repair process and now enjoys his fetishes with borders that they can both enjoy without risk.

Anon’s deeply damaged genitals prior to surgery

* * *

Tell me a bit about yourself.

I was born and raised in the Montreal, Canada area and am a strictly heterosexual male, married, with no kids yet. I came from a normal family — you know, we ate dinner together every night — not super happy and close knit like the perfect families you see in the movies, but we were all pretty much normal and content. I was always more reserved and kept to myself growing up, with no girlfriends until I met my wife five years ago…

I breezed through high school and then did one semester of college. I didn’t really like the way the teaching structure was set up: “Ok, class, read pages 100 to 975, do the exercises on pages 976 through 980, and if you have any questions ask me later” — a quote from almost all my teachers… If I wanted to teach myself everything, I would have gone to the library. I dropped out and went to work and had several jobs over the years until I found I had a talent and passion for computers. Now I work in the IT industry in a corporate environment.

What body modifications have you undergone?

The only permanent “mods” I have are one nipple ring in my right nip, and a huge asshole from regular stretching.

I had tried genital beading a short time after having read an article in Penthouse. I didn’t know how so I just cut slots in the skin and pushed the beads in and taped up the holes. After a couple days, the holes hadn’t healed and were starting to look bad, so I got scared and opened them up. I hadn’t used stainless steel so the beads were turning black… I popped them out, washed everything, and let it heal.

I now have skin graft scars on my entire penis and scrotum except for the knob. The graft was the result of that stupidness with mineral oil…

Why did you inject mineral oil into your genitals? It almost always turns out badly when people try that… I hope it wasn’t after you saw it on BME!

I decided to do this on my own but it happened in two steps. Once, before I had heard of BME, I wanted to do something to make my dick bigger a little more permanently. Thinking of the different things around the house, I came up with the bright idea of injecting mineral oil. The reasoning was “if we can drink it, I can inject it.” Thing is, I didn’t know at the time that mineral oil is used to help with constipation — the body can’t absorb it so it gets expelled…

The first time I only used a little — maybe a couple of CCs. It made a small bump on the top of my cock about an inch long by 3/4 inch wide and 1/4 inch high, roughly oval in shape. I got scared at that point and stopped. The lump sort of flattened, like a saline injection and stayed sort of soft for about a day, getting firmer and firmer. It stopped changing texture after a day or two and didn’t move in any way, shape, or form after that.

When I did the major injection I was twenty one or twenty two and it was several years after the first injection. I hadn’t had a girlfriend (or sex) yet and my dick was all lumpy. I was depressed and looking for a way out, either up or down — I don’t think I cared. I started obsessing about my dick and I can remember thinking that if I made it bigger and smoothed out the bumps, maybe I would get some confidence back and find myself a woman… Vacuum pumping was temporary, as was saline, and I came back to the oil… It had worked the first time, so I did it.

The same state came over me again where my hands were shaking, my heart was pounding, and I was not in control anymore… the little short circuit in my brain that pushes me do do all these things was more there than I was I think. I injected some oil into my cock and it looked good, so I injected more… I was hard as a rock and I could really see what it looked like — nice and fat and smooth. It looked normal, but really fat, like after a good pumping session. I was in a trance and just kept thinking how I wanted to be bigger and injected a whole lot more into my sac, at the base of my cock. It didn’t hurt at all — none of it. I don’t know if it was the euphoric state I was in, or if mineral oil just goes in that way. I massaged the oil around to make it even and by then was so primed up I had to jerk off. I had no other choice: I had to cum…

In all I think I injected 500cc into my sac and maybe 250cc more into my dick…

Over the next couple of days the euphoria wore off pretty quickly. I was sure I was going to die because of this. Not because it looked bad at first or anything — I just sort of had a premonition… Because of my state of mind at that point I just said “ok, shit happens” and let it go… The appearance deteriorated over the first week, sort of stopped for a while, and then constantly got worse and worse…

The problem is, my dick, like every other guy’s on the planet, isn’t erect 24 hours a day. Because I had filled it up while hard, my skin was stretched out over the length of my erect cock. When I go soft, I am about half the erect length, and the oil and stretched skin had to go somewhere… the best analogy I can think of would be grabbing your cock at the base and pulling the skin towards the knob. It sort of bunches up around the head, right? Imagine this now with 250cc of oil under the skin. The oil wanted to stay long and flat because it was hardening, but my soft cock was trying to pull back into my body like usual.

It took about a month but I finally wound up with a sort of doughnut shaped bulge of skin around the head of my soft cock. The bulge took up the whole length of my dick between the head and the base. It wasn’t lumpy, and it stayed smooth, but it was very firm and not pliable. It was permanent, and when I got hard, the skin didn’t change shape or stretch out. It pulled the skin from the base of my dick outwards. I was the same length hard as before, only half of my dick stayed inside. Think of my previous analogy — when you pull the skin of your dick towards the head, the pad at the base sort of pulls up along your cock, right? Same thing was happening to me. All the time. The skin that had been injected didn’t move, didn’t slide, or bend — it was just stuck to the outer half of my dick. Because the skin didn’t move this caused two complications.

First, because I had also injected into my sac, the joint between dick and sac was no longer very flexible. Erections at night and from masturbation pulled out my dick, but the skin under there couldn’t handle it and eventually split. The split grew wider and deeper until I was scared it would cut into my urethra. It never healed over and no matter how often I washed it, it was constantly seeping puss or lymph… the split never cut into the urethra but it wound up covering a third of the diameter of my dick.

The second complication was caused by the same problem — getting hard was pulling on tissue that had no give but was aggravated by being soft too. The skin just below head of my dick and where the shaft attached started to split as well. The head of my cock was slowly being pulled under the skin, but there was no give there either. The skin split on top of my dick too, just below where the glans ends. This pocket went about half way around and was about 3/4 inch deep, and because it was very hard to keep clean, puss and lymph would build up under there. The pocket broke through eventually and made a second hole in the surface skin. That hole slowly tore out along the whitish scarred lump until it totally separated on that side.

All this took about five years to evolve. It wasn’t painful, but it was gross. I had to put folded up paper towels in my underwear to keep the oozing under control, and it always stank.

What did you tell the doctors when you eventually decided to have it treated?

What did I tell them? The truth. I wanted them to fix it and I wanted everything to work so I had to give the docs all the info they needed to do the job right. I actually had several doctors… In Montreal there are mostly teaching hospitals so I saw just about every intern there — they don’t see stuff like this every day I guess! My actual doctors though consisted of three of the senior urologists and the senior plastic surgeon.

They started by removing most of the mass from my sac as much as they could. I had an epidural and sedative for this part and I actually started to wake up during the operation. All of a sudden I could feel them pulling on my genitals. It was scary for a few seconds until someone gave me another shot of sedative and I fell asleep again. This took a while to heal, and there was a complication because the drains were taken out too early so I had a build up of blood in my sac. They had sent me home to rest and I would go in a couple times a week for follow up. The blood clot finally forced open the sutures, so when I went back in they had to rinse out the holes to break up the clot. I was told to massage out as much of the clot as I could every day in the shower after irrigating the hole with saline from a big syringe. The first time, about 125ml of clotted blood came out. I was resigned to all this so it didn’t affect me too much… well, when the sutures split I freaked out a bit, but afterwards I was sort of detached — clinical about it all.

My wife didn’t look too much because she’s squeamish, but she was always there to support me. Luckily, I had continued doing inflation play after injecting the oil which had stretched the tissue, so there was enough healthy skin to leave me a good sized sac. The scrotal results were encouraging, and it was time to remove the rest of the mass from my dick. The doctors had no idea if I would still be able to function afterwards — at this point I could still get hard and ejaculate — so the wife and I went to a fertility clinic to set up a sperm bank. We found out that I was producing no live sperm… no sperm at all in fact. There just seemed to be some immature sperm but nothing else. That hurt. I wasn’t really sure if I wanted kids but to have the option taken away like that hurt both of us…

The penis operation was sort of like a breast lift. They cut a vertical incision in the skin above my cock to where the base was supposed to be and pulled the shaft back up to that point. They stitched the skin together around the base to close it up. Then they removed all the injected skin on my shaft, which is to say, all of it. There was no original skin left on it at all, so they took a slice of skin from my belly in the crease where your pants button up for the graft — a free tummy tuck. The plastic surgeon had never done anything like this before so this was her best guess. She wrapped the strip around the shaft from the base towards the tip and stapled the sides of the strip together to form a sort of tube. They put it in a cast and sutured the knob to my belly button. The cast was to keep the graft in place, and it was stitched to my navel to keep it stretched out.

I was in the hospital for two weeks I think, but I can’t really remember because I was on morphine. The pain was excruciating. I would get erections at night, and at first I was happy it still worked, but getting hard in the cast pulled at the graft. I can remember waking up writhing in pain from my hard on, and hitting the plunger for more morphine from the automatic drip. I would fall asleep only to wake up later writhing again… I asked for something to keep me from getting hard, but they said that kind of medicine restricts blood flow and wouldn’t be good for the graft. It was a week before I could get by without the morphine, and a week after that they sent me home.

I complained to the nurse that the cast smelled funny before leaving and she told me that it was because I couldn’t wash properly, but the next day I was delirious and running a fever. My wife rushed me back to the hospital where they took lots of blood for tests, and discovered I had a systemic infection. About an hour later the plastic surgeon showed up and took off the cast. She started grumbling under her breath and started to remove bits of skin and staples. The skin was brown and looked like leather. When she was done she said something like “it’s all messed up” and stormed off.

I was scared shitless. I thought my dick was going to fall off! Turns out that 80% of the graft had failed — only a fifth of it was still alive. Apparently they had me under observation in the urology wing, but the nurses didn’t recognize the signs of the graft failing. They kept me for another week to cure the infection, cleaned up my dick, and sent me to the local clinic for daily follow ups. The failed skin had to scar completely and the grafted skin needed a chance to heal. I had to take baths every night in water and use bleach to clean it.

When it was finally healed enough to try again the plastic surgeon used another technique. She took a patch of skin off of my thigh, a rectangle about 4 inches by 6 inches which was only the surface layers of skin though, unlike the first strip which had the complete epidermis. A sort of waxed gauze was used as a bandage that gave support, but was not too rigid. This graft worked much better with about 80% surviving this time, and then back to the baths and cleaning, until the grafted skin spread to fill in the gaps. In all it took about four months.

All this time I had a catheter through my belly, directly into my bladder to urinate. Even that caused problems. Because I was being seen by a plastic surgeon and not a urologist, they forgot to have the catheter changed. After four months, mineral deposits had formed on the tube in my bladder and the doctor couldn’t get it out. This caused more complications, pain, and worry… The funny thing about all this is that I am a hairy guy. Why is that funny? The first graft came from my belly, and since it was the whole thickness of skin it included the hair follicles — I now have a couple of spots on my dick that I have to pluck once in a while. If I don’t, my wife complains they tickle her throat!

After the initial healing was done, we were super happy. I could still get hard, and could still ejaculate and orgasm. My dick was short though — skin grafts shrink while they heal, so I only had about half my original length. But, at least that half could be used for what it should be — SEX!

A friend of mine who had similar graft work after cancer almost totally lost sensation in the shaft. Did you lose much sensation?

I lost a lot, but not all of it — maybe 60%. I am really happy that none of the oil made it into my knob! I strongly suggest pumping for your friend. It engorges the skin with blood, and the swelling helps the tissue expand.

I guess if the oil had gotten into the glans, you’d probably have lost it, and if you’d gone deeper, into the cavernosum, you’d need an implant to get hard?

Yup, that’s what the docs told me, but the implant wouldn’t work. No glans, no skin, and no cavernosum — nothing to put an implant in! It would have come off… ugh… I get chills just thinking about it…

How was the healing?

I had trouble sleeping… The catheter and bag meant that my bladder hadn’t been used to hold piss for four months, and it shrunk. Also, because the skin grafts were tight and inflexible, being basically scars, erections at night were painful if they lasted too long. I’d have to get up to piss every hour or two, making for short nights… When I finally got back to work, bus rides turned into my worst nightmare. Almost every day I would get on the bus only to have to take a piss five minutes later and by the time I got to town, the pain from holding it in was terrible. After a while though things got back to normal.

I started pumping both my cock and balls again, and have done some inflation. The pumping actually had an added benefit too. Pumping my cock actually helped stretch out the grafted skin! When I get hard, I actually have almost all of my original length and the skin is much more supple. I also went back to the fertility clinic for more tests and found out that I am now producing 40% live sperm, 90% of which are “fast”, which means that I could reproduce naturally without too much difficulty!

That’s excellent news. Do you mind telling me about the first time you had sex after your penis was fixed? What was it like?

The first time we tried, not long after the operation, sort of flopped. We were both too nervous… but the second time, we both came — it was a very special moment for us. We had loved each other for a long time and had not been able to have sex… sure, we did other things but it was not the same.

All in all it turned out very well. The graft is more supple but doesn’t slide up and down like normal dick skin, and I think this is a good thing… for my wife. She really likes how it feels. I’m sort of like a real, living, textured dildo!

Think you’ll every try a permanent expansion again, this time with something a bit safer like silicone?

No — I will never do anything like that again. Pumping is the only thing I do to it now. I think the fact that I’m with my wife, coupled with all the pain I had to endure have knocked back that uncontrollable urge, so I won’t get carried away… in any case, my wife likes it the way it is!

* * *

You’ve mentioned pumping and inflation — let’s talk about your play activities.

In my case, “play” has always been private and sexual in nature. Everything I ever did to myself was either to make something bigger, or to get off. Simple as that. These things turn me on in one way or another. Don’t ask me why though because I couldn’t tell you — the only guess I can come up with is that it is genetic.

Part of me actually thinks it’s quite normal, and that most people just keep it repressed.

Normal? I don’t think so. Some people may keep these urges repressed and that’s not good, but I tend to think that there is no “norm”. Everybody’s brain is wired differently — simple as that. That’s why we have violent people and passive ones, leaders and followers, mathematicians and poets and race car drivers. It’s rare that one person is really good in more than one situation. I think the same goes for our appetites and urges as well…

So you literally think it’s genetic I guess —

My first cock pump was stolen out of my dad’s drawer — washed before use of course — and he had some other stuff in there too… we are of German descent on his side, and if you think about it, where does most of the hardcore kink on the net or on video come from? Deutschland. 1+1=2, I guess…

I don’t suppose it’s something you really talk to your parents to, but do you know the extent to which he was into these things? I wonder…

No, we didn’t really talk about it but he had needles and elastic bands and tubes, and a dildo too… he knew that something was up. When he gave the “sexuality speech” to my sister and I, he told us about the time he put a hatpin in his dick when he was in puberty and it got stuck. He had to go to the hospital to get it removed. The point of the story was to get us to ask questions instead of doing something stupid… I wasn’t much of a talker I guess…

So how did it all start for you?

The first “weird” thing I can remember doing goes back to just after I hit puberty. I had taken a latex rubber glove from the first aid kit and blown it up in my pants. The sight of my “balls” blowing up, slowly getting bigger and bigger was a real turn on for me. The pressure of the inflated glove pressing on my cock and balls was also really nice.

Around the same time I had seen one of the James Bond movies where Bond kills the bad guy at the end by putting a compressed air pellet in his mouth. The villain blew up like a balloon, floated up to the ceiling where a spike burst him. I don’t remember which episode it was and I’m not sure if I saw the movie before or after the glove but these two things are what kicked off my obsession with erotic play in the inflation-expansion-stretching fetish domain.

Over the years I have “played” by sticking things up my ass, always deeper and bigger, always trying to get in a little bit more — I love being fisted by my wife! I also love things in my mouth… the dildos I used up my ass also went down my throat, after being cleaned. Never real cock though — as strange as it may seem, I have absolutely no homosexual tendencies, repressed or otherwise… I have inserted condoms and balloons into all my different orifices and blown them up. I have pumped my cock and balls. I’ve done saline and air inflation of my cock, balls, and breasts. Deep sounding. Multiple piercings of my nipples, cock, and balls. At one point I even bought several six foot diameter balloons — the same ones you can actually get inside. My current play favorite is body inflation. Using either air or water, I slowly fill myself up until my belly is completely distended.

I’ve never tried that — what does that feel like? It’s basically like an enema but with a lot more volume?

That’s it exactly, a high volume enema with air or water. This one definitely isn’t for everyone… if your intestines can’t take it, you can’t do it even if you want to! This goes back to my main fetish of inflation, getting bigger, and swelling. It’s also the physical sensation that goes along with it — sort of a double whammy… Think of it this way: you have a thirty foot long balloon in your gut called intestines, and the more you fill them up, the bigger you get!

Is it different depending on whether you use air or water?

The process and feeling are unique to each. With air you just stick in a hose and start pumping until you’re full. You have to go slow for a couple reasons though — to allow your intestines to relax and expand (otherwise you get cramps), and if there is a plug of shit in there somewhere it gives time for the air to seep around it… And you go slow to avoid too much pressure — if you burst your intestine you’re probably going to die from it. Also, from my experiments with inflation in other body parts, air can infuse tissues which is probably not a great idea.

Water is different in that it makes a big mess… I usually do it lying down in the tub. Again, low pressure is the key to getting big, but because water is denser than air it won’t seep around any plugs. This means you have to fill up some, let out the water — and anything else — and start again, and usually you get more in every time. I think it is also safer because it won’t permeate the tissues like air does. It won’t compress though, and it also tends to come out right away since it’s harder to hold in.

In both cases the best position for filling is on your back in an almost seated position. Lying flat stretches out the stomach too much and you don’t bulge as much.

And what does it feel like?

The sensation is incredible… you can feel both air or water slowly seeping deeper into you, filling you up, pressing on your bladder, stomach, belly, and diaphragm… slowly pressing your belly outwards, getting tighter and tighter — I have actually had to take shallow breaths because of the pressure. The sight of your belly blowing up combined with the tight, blown up feeling is a real trip! With air it is lighter and gives a rounder, more pronounced belly. Tapping on it when you’re really full sounds almost like a balloon — hollow… Water feels much heavier, and when you’re full, you’re full… because of the weight it tends to spread you out more width-wise than in height. You’re not going to look nine months pregnant — more like you’re pushing out your gut as far as you can. Obviously the more you do it, the bigger you’ll get too. At first it can be a little disappointing because you can’t hold too much. You really have to be able to relax and let it flow.

Getting the air or water out again is also different. When I use water, it all comes out in a few minutes. The whole process, including several inflations, can take an hour or so combined. Air on the other hand takes a lot longer. Since you can’t really move around when you’re full, you had better pick a good spot. The best thing to do is roll over on your left side and just fart until it all gets out. It usually takes me twenty minutes to get the air down to a “normal feeling” pressure, but it can take hours to get it all out. I guess air is better if you want to have sex or masturbate while filled because you keep it in more easily and can do it pretty much anywhere. Water is good for solo sessions.

* * *

After all the problems you’ve had, what do you think keeps you going?

Sometimes I just really get the urge to blow myself up… A raging need to inflate, stretch, or pierce something and get off by doing it. I have toned down my activity now that I’m married, but it always comes back to getting bigger and getting off. My wife isn’t really into this stuff but she tolerates it, and even participates sometimes when I get the urge!

That’s good — I know a few guys who’ve actually gotten divorced because their wives weren’t able to understand their needs in this area.

She doesn’t really like most of the things I do but won’t put her foot down if I feel like scratching an urge, even if she doesn’t understand why… She doesn’t stifle me at all, but having her in my life and knowing that she doesn’t want me to get hurt keeps me grounded and within safe limits… before I met her I was obsessive about my fetish. It was compulsive and dangerous I wound up in the hospital a couple of times…

In any case we love each other enough to be able to let these things slide…

I think it’s quite normal for guys’ masturbatory play to amplify when their partners aren’t around or they don’t have them. I know that’s the case for most of the people I’ve interviewed!

I hear you — If I wasn’t married and I didn’t have to go to work every day I would probably need a football to plug my ass and have a beach ball sized nut sack! I actually still fantasize about that, even after all I’ve been through… injecting saline, or inflating day after day until my scrotum is several feet in diameter… and doing my gut until I’m huge is another fantasy. My biggest fantasy though would be to blow up my wife. Nothing permanent — this is a fantasy — but blowing her tits and belly up like balloons while fucking her… mmmmmmmmm…

My wife is actually a little modded herself… she had breast implants done last year, so she has a little bit of an idea of what’s going on.

Her breast implants were for her own reasons I assume?

I brought up the idea but she had always said she wanted to be bigger — it was 100% for both of us. She actually wants to go bigger now… again for both of us, but this time she was the one who suggested it. Now that I think if it, she really got hot for the idea after I blew up a couple of balloons in her bra under her clothes. We had sex like that and the sight of herself in the mirror with those big tits turned her on.

* * *

When you were young, after doing the inflations in your underwear, what did you try next?

The next thing I can remember is sounding. I would take a 1/4 inch tube and stick it in all my holes. At first I would push it up my cock, using a little spit for lube and working it up. Feeling it go in deeper and deeper was a real turn on. The more I would do it, the further I would go too… all the way into my bladder! A couple of times I would blow air or water into myself this way, filling up my bladder to its limit. It felt really weird, seeing the air bubbles coming out of my dick while expelling the air.

What does it feel like? Is it just like having to pee or is there more to it? Is it a head trip or a physical sensation?

It’s not quite the same as having to pee — I never had to pee that bad! It sort of burns a bit too, but it’s not a super experience physically so I would have to say it’s more of a head trip related to the inflation fetish… It’s probably dangerous too — I don’t think kidneys would react to well having air forced into them.

And you actually did inflations in your urethra as well?

At first I wanted see how much I could blow up a condom in my cock. The pressure would build and I could feel the condom stretching inside my urethra bit by bit… after a couple of tries I could see my cock expanding a little from the pressure. The cool thing about condoms is that they are clean — if not sterile — and very smooth and very stretchy, and also start stretching with little force. A condom blows up easily while you really have to strain to get a balloon going. This means that once the condom is blocked off by the walls of a body cavity, it won’t exert much pressure on anything before stretching off wherever it has room. Being so stretchy and smooth, it can expand like this quite some way. You just have to be careful because they burst more easily.

Once or twice I actually pushed the condom all the way into my bladder. Once the end of the condom was in my bladder — trust me you can feel it — I would blow into it gently. I could feel the condom expanding, stretching out my bladder, until I felt like I had to piss. I could also feel it stretching out the opening of my urethra. While I was doing this I would be so turned on — heart pounding, light-headed, and euphoric. I would only see the excitement of it… after another intense orgasm, the blood in my cum brought me down to earth fast, blood from my urethra being stretched out and torn. Pissing really burned afterwards too, but I have always seemed to heal quickly though and this discomfort only seemed to last a few days. Because of the risk of a condom bursting inside me, I started inflating condoms and balloons in my ass instead.

But you started the ass inflation games with earlier dildo play?

All of these fetishes sort of developed along with each other, and as each one got more and more extreme I would incorporate the others in and develop them as well… I first tried anal insertion using the tube in the shower to blow some air up my ass. I had done an enema so I felt clean enough to start playing up there with my fingers — slowly I would try to get more fingers in. It was a bit painful but it didn’t hurt — it felt good! I wanted to see how deep I could go, and what it would feel like, so I grabbed what I could — the toilet brush! I was still young at this point, and didn’t have any money, and not much sense. It went in fairly easily and I worked it in deeper and deeper. I could feel it hit my intestine where it turns over to the side — a weird sensation, but in a good way. I said “what the fuck” and sort of twisted it to the side so I could get in deeper. I manged to push it in the rest of the way — about fourteen inches of plastic handle was up my ass! You can guess how I felt now, so I masturbated there in the shower with the toilet brush handle up my ass. From then on my parents started calling me “Mister Clean” because I was always in the shower!

As time went on I started working, and I bought several dildos in different sizes, from an average sized dick up to a big chunk of hand molded rubber roughly square, 3×4 inches in size… and even that wasn’t big enough…

I always started with a nice long enema to get myself cleaned out — shit is not one of my turn-ons! I would go lie down in bed and stretch myself out. At first the stretching consisted of putting the dildo and as many fingers as I could up my ass, and later it would be two dildos and fingers, then three… Eventually I was able to fist myself and I have big hands! I bought a Long John Silver dildo — about a foot and a half long and three inches thick — and would ride it for hours. I even used my handyman techniques on it — I had cut out a hole in the dildo near my anus and put in a dissected vibrator, sealed the hole up with melted rubber, and went along for the ride. After a while I wanted even more so I went out and bought “the chunk”… the sensation was amazing, being totally stretched out. I would bring myself to “anal orgasm”, and my intestine would spasm pushing out the dildo — it was like cumming but ten times stronger. Even this wasn’t enough though.

At this point I started experimenting with bigger inflations in my ass. I would inflate condoms as big as I could get them, and I used those cylindrical balloons as well. Not the small ones clowns use to make animals, but the bigger ones. I was blowing them up just to the point where it started to hurt, each time filling up more and more. Feeling the balloon push deeper into my belly, I would masturbate that way with the balloon filling me up. The spasming of ejaculation uses some of the same muscles as clenching your ass so the feeling of being stretched and trying to clench while cumming was mind blowing.

When I finished I would push out the balloon to see how big I had gone that day — by now my ass was huge, but for part of me, it wasn’t enough. I wanted to stretch myself out more… Ingenuity to the rescue again! I melted down the Long Dong Silver dildo on the kitchen stove. At night while my parents were sleeping I had made a plaster mold of a Pepsi Super Gulp bottle and filled it with the melted rubber. Long John wasn’t enough, so I melted down another dildo the next night and I wound up with a big bullet shaped hunk of rubber. I was hard as a rock and dripping with the thought of forcing this thing up my ass — “force” being the operative word! After the standard enema and a little warm-up I tried… and tried. It wouldn’t go all the way in to its biggest point. Did I stop? No, I grabbed a chair, put the dildo on it and sat down. I used my weight to force it in slowly. In a bit, out a bit, in a little more… god, that thing was huge! It took me several tries on different days but I finally got it in. I came so hard I almost passed out! That thing was taking all the free space down there and making more, pressing on my prostate and everything else. I kept at it until I was able to use it like a normal dildo, pushing it in by hand.

I still wanted more, so I made another mold. This one was a vase that was about the same size as the Super Gulp but I used some “lifelike dildos” made of softer rubber… softer because I wanted this one this one to be inflatable. Same process — mold, melted rubber, but I put a thick, three foot balloon inside which was about 8 inches and flat when deflated. I hooked it up to a bicycle pump and really stretched my ass out! This one looked a bit like a giant butt plug — pointy, bigger in the middle, and narrower at the base… the balloon was right at the biggest point which was also about as deep as I could get it inside me. I would start with the chunk, then switch to the plug, again forcing it in with my weight, and then I would start pumping. It was painful but the sensation of stretching out and building up the pressure was intense — I can’t really describe it… just orgasmicly intense! I could feel the plug actually pushing on my pelvic bones… it was amazing being stretched this much!

This became an obsession — I always wanted to get bigger and bigger…

And you were doing vacuum pumping and inflating as well?

Yes, standard stuff. I couldn’t make any permanent growth, but I would get really fat, filling up the tube. I always used my mouth do create the suction so I could go harder than with a hand bulb. I used to blister myself all the time but I wouldn’t stop — the pressure was too exciting. I would burst the blisters as they would appear to keep them from getting bigger and keep pumping… Once I had more blisters on the end of my cock than skin. I couldn’t even masturbate afterwards, it was so sore. I am not a masochist though… pain doesn’t turn me on, nor does inflicting pain. It’s just that sometimes I can turn the pain from some areas of my body off, or change it into pleasure when I’m in the right frame of mind. Nipples, cock, and nut sack — that’s it. Anything else doesn’t do it for me…

After pumping my cock I tried to pump my balls but couldn’t really do it well with a standard pump. This is before I started working, so I didn’t have money to buy anything bigger… I tried to make some pumps out of stuff around the house but I couldn’t get anything to work. That’s when I said to myself, what if I blew my nut sack up like a balloon? It’s “empty” like a balloon and stretchy, and pumping takes a long time anyways — so why not? How to do it though? I got out one of my hoses and a needle I used to blow up footballs, and a stainless steel nail. I cleaned everything with alcohol, put the needle on the end of the hose, punched a hole in my sac with the nail, and pushed the needle in.

Ouch?

It doesn’t really hurt to tell the truth. Sort of a prick and pop, and it goes in. I usually poke around for an area that is less sensitive — in general I don’t feel pain like most people do either… I remember in school we did an experiment where the teacher stamped a small grid of twenty-five squares onto our arms. We then used a needle to poke our skin to see how many squares we felt pain in. Most people felt pain in about 80% of the squares. I only actually felt pain in about a tenth.

Anyway, so you’re sitting there with a needle in your nut sack and a football pump.

My hands were shaking I was so wound up, and I can remember thinking “this is probably not a good idea”… but that other part of my brain that seems to take over when I get an “urge” said, “fuck it, blow” and I did.

The sensation was really different. First, because the needle had a relatively large diameter I was able to inflate much quicker than with, say, a syringe. I could feel the air spreading out under my skin while my sac expanded. It sort of tickled. My sac didn’t blow up like a balloon like I thought it would either — I could see the air spreading out under the skin, raising up the surface like Bugs Bunny digging a tunnel. When the air had raised the surface of my sac evenly I really started to swell. The first time I got to about the size of a big orange. I could feel the air pushing into the cavities where my balls dropped down from as a baby… I was hard as a rock and ready to cum. Then I started to feel the air pushing into the pad of skin around the base of my cock, under my pubes, and I came back down to earth. I hadn’t tied anything off so the air was spreading up into the skin of my belly.

Still excited, I pulled out the needle and watched as I deflated… a little. Then it stopped. Now I was a little worried. I had thought the air would all come back out… not! I pressed on my balls, squeezed them to force more air out, and that worked. I inflated again, this time using a bit of string to tie off my sac. Because I was tied off I could go bigger and use more pressure… I was shaking in the grip of a kind of euphoric madness I guess, and I couldn’t stop inflating and deflating myself. At the biggest, I could see the color of the skin changing to a sort of yellowy orange as air bubbles spread between the different layers of skin. I was the size of a big grapefruit and the skin was so full it was shiny. I jerked off to one of the most powerful ejaculations in my life. Then I came back to myself a little and started pushing out as much air as I could.

I only managed to get out about half — the air had permeated my skin and wasn’t coming out the hole! I was a little worried, but my logic was “if they can operate on people and let air in I’ll be alright.” But later that evening I got the shakes and felt sick. As if I had a fever, but I didn’t… after two days the feeling went away but my sac was still huge.

That’s really frightening — have you ever dragged an infection into your scrotum from air or saline play? I know a couple guys that have come very close to death because of how quickly these types of infections can escalate.

I wound up in the hospital twice with an infection. The first time was really bad. I had tried using water to inflate and was poorly prepared, and when the water didn’t work, I used air. The swelling went down, and then came back, red and hot. I wasn’t feeling very good by then and in the shower one morning about a week later I was massaging my balls when the original hole opened up and some purple yellow puss spewed out. That scared the shit out of me and I got my parents to take me to the hospital.

You’re lucky you didn’t die! Seriously!

I had a general infection at that point and could have died had I let it go any longer. I told my parents that I had fallen on the back of a chair while changing a light bulb. This had caused the swelling and a shaving cut on my nuts caused the infection — I told them that I was too shy to tell them about the swelling. The second time I recognized the symptoms sooner and took myself to the hospital…

On that second air inflation, how long did it take the air to eventually dissipate?

Three weeks of wearing loose clothes and tight underwear — loose clothes to hide what I’d done, and tight underwear to press the air into my system a fast as possible. From what I could find out, the sick feeling I experienced was a form of shock. Of course, my logic at this point said, “I lived, I am healthy and healed, so I can do this again!”

I did, many times… too often to count. The sick feeling got less and less every time I did it, but was always enough to make me feel weird for a few days. The biggest I ever got was about the size of a cantaloupe. I have also inflated my cock using a syringe needle — like vacum pumping but instantaneous. I even used so much pressure — with a bicycle pump — that the air was forced under the skin of my knob a couple of times. It was completely inflated, so light tapping on it made a hollow sound like a balloon that’s about to pop. Feeling the skin of your cock being filled to the limit like that is intense! The yellowing was definitely air bubbles, and the sensation was twice as strong in the knob because of its sponge-like nature. I jerked off my now-fat cock and came hard as usual, but it itched like crazy afterwards, especially the knob.

I know there’s no truth to the “if you get air in your bloodstream you’ll die of an embolism” warning, but did you ever worry that you weren’t just going to have a problem afterwards, but actually drop dead on the spot?

I was in the hospital once and the nurse was giving me an IV and there was a tiny bubble in the line. I asked her if it was dangerous and she said no. Air in your bloodstream can kill you, but you need to inject it directly into an artery going to the heart, and you need enough of a bubble to cause cavitation in the heart’s ventricles — it’s impossible to do this inflating your sac. I also came across a procedure or two on the net where doctors inject air into body cavities to perform endoscopic surgeries, and saw a news article where a woman working in a balloon shop fell on the compressed air canister, punctured her skin, and inflated her ass and one leg! Apparently she felt the same shock reaction I mentioned.

I guess it was that shock sensation that made you try out saline instead?

Yes — by now I had an Internet connection so I did a little research and found BME! Wow, there are others like me? Cool! I found the saline section — Eureka! There were no side-effects mentioned, and it was able to be absorbed quickly by the body naturally. What could be better? The only problem was that I was still at home, couldn’t order it, and in any case, was leery of ordering stuff off the Internet and injecting it into my body… I went to the drugstore to see what I could find. All they had was saline for contact lenses… I figured if I could put it in my eyes I should be able to inject it, right?

I built a drip bag by cleaning out a 2 liter plastic bottle and putting a hole in the bottom. I forced a length of vinyl tubing into the hole and sealed it off on the outside using hot glue. I flushed it out with alcohol, filled it, and started… Nothing happened. The needles I had were all very small and needed pressure to get the liquid through in enough quantities to make a visible difference, so I cut the nozzle off of a bicycle inner tube, leaving a circle of rubber around the base. I drilled a hole in the bottle cap the size of the nozzle, put the nozzle through the hole and screwed the cap on the bottle. The cap pressed the rubber circle enough to create a seal so I was in business. I hooked in the bicycle pump and started building up pressure slowly. I could feel the saline infusing the tissue but it was too slow. I couldn’t see it happening so I increased the pressure. I could now see the saline going down in the bottle and see my sac filling up. It was way different than the air. Air is not at all painful — it sort of tickles going in — but this was more invasive, more like it was forcing its way in and it hurt — real pain, not a “feel good” pain… But I wanted to see myself bigger, so I kept at it.

That day I made it to 500ml. My sack felt really full and heavy when I stood up, and it pulled at my abdominal flesh and muscles. The heavy feeling was extremely erotic, but then it started to ache… and spasm. I don’t know if this was caused by the type of saline I used, the speed I infused at, or if it is normal but fuck it hurt!

It was probably the type of saline… You also get a lot of pain if you use water rather than saline.

I laid down on my side cradling my sac for what seemed like a couple of hours until the pain subsided. It went completely away, leaving me with a huge heavy sac full of saline. I started playing with it, fondling, feeling the weight, swinging it between my legs. This actually forced the saline a little lower into my sac and made it look more natural. Again, I was completely aroused… I guess by now I don’t need to explain what happened next!

I tried this several times, again going bigger and bigger. The druggist where I bought my saline started to look at me funny I was buying so much. The biggest volume I ever reached using saline was over a liter and a half… My sac was completely stretched out… shiny and transparent looking. When the pain subsided and I could enjoy the experience I was ecstatic. I was huge and heavy — really heavy! The skin of my sac was super sensitive and it was stretched out so much. It was actually pulling the abdominal skin above my cock down over it. I couldn’t even walk straight I was so big… I noticed that the weight of so much saline was forcing its way down, stretching my already filled-to-the-limit skin even more. What looked like stretch marks formed under my sac, red lines racing across the underside… I didn’t care though, I was huge!

After a shower, I dried off and waddled back to my room. I took off my bathrobe — the only way to dress if you want to hide something like this by the way — and I noticed some moisture between my legs. The weight of the saline was actually forcing it to seep out through my skin! I lay down to take off some of the weight and I played with myself for hours that day while my body reabsorbed the saline. It was an unforgettable experience. I stopped using saline after that though — it hurt too much to be worth it. I tried using hot water to pump several times and got so-so results, but it took too long to get to a good size. Part of the trip is seeing myself grow, not just the results of eight hours of pumping.

* * *

You mentioned earlier that you did some permanent piercing as well?

I have made pincushions out of my knob and nipples — always for the same reason: bigger, bigger, more, more, more! I had read stories about how piercings in erogenous zones increase sensitivity and I said, this is for me. I sharpened a bicycle spoke with a file and polished it until it could cut paper — if you haven’t guessed by now, one of my jobs back then was at a bicycle store. I numbed my nipple using ice and stuck the needle in, and realized that nipples are really tough! I had to re-freeze my nipple three times before I got all the way through. I then put in a ring, bought at a piercing shop, and discovered why people use tapers to get the jewelry in. This was a learning experience though, and the pain of the piercing wore off in a couple minutes, leaving me with a swollen, hyper-sensitive nipple. Being sensitive anyways, it was really exciting. The feel of it, all tight and pulsing was somehow very erotic for me. In the weeks that followed, I moved on to my other nipple, then a frenum piercing.

I went back to the shop and bought a couple heavier gauge rings, wondering how I was going to get them in. I used my trusty bicycle spokes to make homemade stretcher rings. Each time I stretched it was just as sensitive as the first piercing… each time I was so aroused I had to jerk off. Eventually the skin under my knob couldn’t take it any more and split, leaving two little stumps. I wanted to do my cock again so I pierced myself a Prince Albert and stretched it out one ring at a time, up to 2 gauge. It felt great! Feeling the weight hanging off my cock, pulling at it all the time was another unique, intense sensation in among a multitude of unique, intense sensations! I could force my little finger through the hole to the first knuckle. In the meantime this had inspired to do more piercings… My left nipple got the same treatment as the PA, although I stopped at an 8 gauge. My right nipple had four homemade studs through it, one horizontal, one vertical, and two others making an ‘X’ behind them. My knob also got more metal, eventually working up to several ampallangs. I couldn’t wait to heal them… I had to jerk off… the feel of the metal rings and balls in my hand, and the sensation of them pulling at the holes was so intense… I should have waited to heal though, as I wound up in the hospital with another general infection! All the piercings came out after that, but I recently redid my nipples.

* * *

You said your wife fists you and that she’s generally supportive of you, but how did you first tell her about your fetishes?

Well, she doesn’t really like what I do, but sometimes I get her to participate. The fisting for example — she didn’t want anything to do with it at first, but I convinced her to try… she wound up liking it. She likes the fact that she can bring me to such intense orgasms, and actually, the most intense orgasms I have had were from her fisting me. Usually she is in complete control too. When she’s halfway to her elbow up my ass she can make me cum or not — it’s up to her. If she doesn’t stop when I tell her to, I just keep cumming… it’s very intense. She has even said she’s a bit jealous that she can’t cum like that.

When I met her I was badly scarred from the injections — I hadn’t sought out treatment for the mineral oil until after I met my wife. We met, fell in love, and when we were in bed for the first time I didn’t have any choice but to tell her. I choked up and had trouble saying anything… I was scared she’d dump me… remember, this was my first and only relationship.

Wow, that must have been incredibly terrifying…

Tell me about it! That’s the thing with my wife though. I was totally at ease talking to her as opposed to being totally clammed up… this was tough but it was do or die.

I had manged to keep it hidden from her up to that point and put her hand on it through my shorts. She asked to see it and I showed her. She was freaked out, but nowhere near as much as she could have been. She was coming out of a bad relationship so it turned out to be a mutual healing process for both of us — literally in my case. I helped her get her mind out of the past and she helped me get treatment.

Shannon Larratt
BME.com