I’m assuming you can tell from the purple marking line on his face which piercing is new. Now, you might be thinking to yourself, why is Shannon calling it a Mantis piercing? Is he going soft in his old age? Because that’s clearly an Austin Bar, not a Mantis piercing! But where you’re wrong is that you’re not looking at one piercing (an Austin bar is a horizontal piercing across the tip of the nose, like a far-forward nasallang), but two. The mantis piercing is essentially a very strangely placed — but still essentially standard — nostril piercing, which also means that it has faster healing than the Austin bar in general. Instead of going out to the side of the nostril, it goes straight forward, and in a pair gives the illusion of being a horizontal bar. It’s not a piercing that would work well on its own, and while you don’t need as many piercings as this perforated fellow, it is a piercing that looks best in combination with other nose work.

This Mantis piercing was done on Nicola by 23 year-old body piercer Massimo Cortese of Wildink Tattoo Studio in Naples, Italy, and currently guest spotting in Ferrara. Done centrally, this piercing would be called a “rhino“, but off-centre Massimo is calling it the Mantis, which I think is a good name for it. Oh and I had fun joking to my daughter that if this person sneezes that everyone around them has to take cover because all that body jewelry goes shooting in every direction like shrapnel. But in all seriousness, I suspect that this piercing in part came about because this gentleman is simple so covered in piercings that they spent some time brainstorming for new places to pierce!