What Were We Thinking? Episode 1

In hopes of bringing some new flavor to this little blog of ours, I’d like to introduce a few new types of post. For instance, we have the “Guess What?” and “From the Vault” post that are regularly occurring themes now.

One of my ideas for a new type of post is “what were we thinking?”. Anybody who has been involved in body modification for several years likely has had some REALLY bad ideas along the way. So long as we have learned from these mistakes and moved forward there is no reason we shouldn’t look back on these fiascos, say “what were we thinking?” and laugh our tattooed asses off.

To kickstart this series, I offer up this picture of my good friend, Mason. Jeebus bless this guy, because he has brought me more laughs at his expense than any other piercer in the history of this industry.

 

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A CBR as a facial surface piercing? BRILLIANT! I can’t believe this didn’t work.

 

Five-Year-Old Scalpelled Nape

On February 1st, 2008, Gabriele of Maxart Bodypiercing in Rome, Italy did a scalpelled nape procedure, and a year later it had healed nicely (as you can see in the left image below). A little redness and scarring around the edges (zoom in for a closer look), but almost none of the rejection or migration as is common with surface piercings done without surface-specific jewelry. By using a scalpel rather than a needle to create a large, non-destructive hole, big enough to form a “flap” that could sit comfortably over the jewelry without the jewelry putting pressure on the tissue above it, Gabriele avoided using something like a surface bar specifically designed to mitigate the pressures that lead to tissue dying off. Surface bars are great of course, but many people prefer the look of a ring to a pair of beads, especially in this age of microdermals. As you can see in the right two pictures, taken at five years after the piercing was done, it’s remained very solid long-term — and as the late Erl proved, piercings like this (his nape was almost identical) can last for decades.

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Rasmus Nielsen Ripley’s Appearance

After my success yesterday in digging up some old news clippings about The Great Omi, I thought I’d do some digging for Rasmus Nielsen, an amazing tattooed strongman that performed from the early 20th century until disappearing after his 1950 retirement. While tattooed strongmen were common, Rasmus was unique because of his stretched piercings through his nipples, nose, tongue, and collar (a “Madison” piercing that rightly should be known as a “Rasmus” piercing perhaps) from which he would lift anvils weighing as much as 250 pounds. Unfortunately the extent of what I could find was the June 16, 1938 edition of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, which I hope is of interest nonetheless. For more, see his entry on The Human Marvels and The BME Encyclopedia.

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Rolf’s new Cyber Cell jewelry from Samppa

A couple days ago Samppa Von Cyborg just installed this great classic Cyber Cell bar into “piercing and suspension celebrity and record holder” Rolf Buchholz. I say “classic” because Samppa made this jewelry way back in 2004, but has been saving it for something special — and when it comes to piercing, there are few as special as Rolf, and Samppa felt the time was perfect to do it for him as a gift. In addition to doing this piercing, he also implanted three hearts (I’m going to assume that this means heart-shaped implants, not three superhuman redundant hearts to make Rolf unkillable, although with Samppa you can never be sure) and a pair of strong magnets.

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I should mention that Rolf is lucky to be alive — look what happened at the recent warehouse suspension hosted by Muffe Vulnuz. Rolf was nearly eaten!!! Thank God he’s alright, because it would have been a real shame for this community to lose such a remarkable character. Damn those giant suspendee-devouring nephilim that are always sniffing out blood and metal and rope.

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Common Procedure but Clever Application

John Garcia of High Class Tattoo and Body Modification in Fresno, California has done something quite interesting for this client that is wearing a large black labret. Using microdermals and caps that closely match the look of the labret, he’s created a staggered series of mods running from lip to chin that are probably quite a head-scratcher for anyone that sees it that isn’t quite familiar with the way body modification works. The procedure in and of itself is nothing special, but the way he’s utilized it is very clever and has given the client a unique result that I’m sure he’s very happy with.

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I wanted to show one other interesting application from the portfolio of John Garcia. Another client came to him with a large scar on his neck, and John pierced across it three times using surface bars with flat disc beads. I get a kick out of this because it’s again the sort of thing that plays head games with people who aren’t intimately acquainted with body piercing — and in this case, I see them assuming what they’re looking at was done for the client at a hospital as a part of saving his life (like pins holding together a broken limb), rather than a piercing.

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Here’s something you don’t see every day

It seems like IAM: .Trevor. is on a roll with the ModBlog posts.  Yesterday we saw a couple of his corsets, and today we’ve got an interesting little ear project involving a small surface bar.

Help out the youngest member of the BME family. Get a limited edition 2012 BME Classic Logo t-shirt. Read all the details here.

On Wings of Fuchsia

Going to wrap today up with another play piercing.  This one involving wings.  Now to be fair these aren’t play piercing needles, but rather surface bars with a hoop on one end to tie up the corset, and the other end attached to some kind of device that holds the feathers in place.  Bart Bastiaanse from Tribal Trading in Tilburg, The Netherlands did the piercings.

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A Piercing Performance – Part 1

We get photos of performance art pieces all the time.  Sometimes it’s suspension related, and other times it involves piercings.  This one in particular is like nothing I’ve seen before, and it involves a lot of piercings.

There’s more to show you, but the rest don’t have any strategically placed arms, so you’ll have to keep reading to see them.

As you can see in the last photo, the piercings are covering her entire body.  In all honesty, these three photos don’t do enough justice to this piece.  I urge you to check out the body surface piercing gallery to see the rest of the photos.  According to the information provided, Dimitri from MTL Tattoo did all the piercings.  No information was given for the models.

Keep an eye out later today for another performance piece put together by Dimitri.

The BMEShop is having a sale right now!

30% EVERYTHING!!

Just use the code 30offbme when you check out!

For love of metal

With today being Valentine’s day, you can expect the posts to be somewhat sappy.  Instead of going the usual route and posting pictures of happy couples, instead I’ll be focusing on modifications that are either “love” related, or express the love of an aspect of our culture.

To kick the day off, we have a heart-shaped set of surface piercings on KayCiDVile, which were done by Amanda from Vivid Ink Tattoo West, in Phoenix, AZ.

Smoking hot

To round out today’s posts here’s a stunning BMEGirl from my hometown of Toronto.

Kat here is a piercer at Ultimate Tattoo, the shop the photographer Dylan Leeder lives above.

While you can find this photo in several galleries on BME thanks to the new system of being able to tag modifications in a photo, the easiest place to find photos of all the BMEGirls is in the BMEGirl gallery.