Confessions of a Body Art Collector

People talk about how a person can be born or made to be a certain way, but body art collectors are born to make themselves the way they wish to be. Or at least that's my experience. My body art collection has grown in much the same way I make Hubs: most often one at a time, not too fast, lots of thought, considerations for the future and always some sort of expression about myself.

I think of my body art collection as being simultaneously a map of where I'm going and a record of where I've been. I knew by the time I was 15 or 16 that I didn't conform to average standards of physical beauty so I worked at letting go of those standards and expectations and made up my own. And everything became more beautiful to me from that point on.

it's been interesting to see how tattooing in American culture has changed over the last twenty-one years. That's how old I was when I got my first piece of ink so I've now been tattooed for half of my overall life. Back then, it was freaky and people used to sneer and say "oh, you mean like... Cher?!"

Now, tattoos seem to be popping up everywhere. In fact, the meaning of the word is being diluted to refer to any sort of skin design, casting aside a few hundred years of language history in which tattooing only meant inked designs permanently made into the skin layers.

When I got my first tattoo, I knew right away I was supposed to be like this and that slowly but surely there would be more... lots more. I don't yet have full sleeves, but I will. I've got my whole life to do them.

The fad of permanent tattoo advertising is really the result (or fault) of the Canadian casino company GoldenPalace.com. They started out by having sports figures and celebrities wear temporary tattoos of their company URL and then they decided to see if they could pay people to have a permanent tattoo put on their bodies. Since 2005, an increasing number of people have decided to sell space on their bodies as advertising real estate.

Even tattoo enthusiasts tend to think people who take money to wear a tattooed advertisement are crazy. And it's often hard to find a tattoo artist who wants to be known for doing this type of tattoo on someone. What's interesting is that many of these people don't care at all about the company they are advertising, they are primarily just interested in getting the highest bid for their bodies.

There are a few catches. Most of these deals involve a contract which stipulates how visible the tattoo must be, and for how many years it has to be in place before the wearer is allowed to change their mind and have it removed. (Remember, tattoos cost 10 times as much coming off as they did going on).

Most body piercing is extremely contemporary, having only been invented in the 20th century. One of the early fans and proponents made up a lot of fictional history for a lot of piercings and you'll still find these false facts being parroted on otherwise reputable sites to this very day.

I was a sophomore in high school (the early 1980s) when having a second ear piercing came into vogue. It was also when lots of New Wave musicians from the UK were getting their ears pierced and straight guys were fretting about whether "right was left and left was wrong." By the time I had graduated, I had five earrings in my left ear, something that got you branded as an alien in suburban New Jersey at the time. By the end of college, that number had doubled and presently, that ear alone is home to just over half the entire number of piercings in my body.

I first gauged my ears in 1990 and anything over 14g had to be hand-crafted from custom wire stock ordered by a jeweler. Now, I can go shopping for my 2g piercings in any mall and on any jewelry website.

Hair: Crew cut short to mid-back long. A full-on mohawk. Blue hair, magenta, purple, red, black and two years unwavering devotion and maintenance to a full head of shoulder-length, hot pink. Now I've got it cut relatively short, and I spend six months of the year purple-haired and the other six months as an unnatural redhead.

Corsetry: Nobody thinks you are weird if you go to the gym, but try lacing yourself into a wrapping of leather and steel boning for hours a day and you'll find out who your friends really are. And how many of your friends are secretly corset fanciers.

Branding: Ah, the kiss of fire. Now there's something to sort your true friends from the casual ones. "Hey, can you come take pictures for two hours while a guy repeatedly heats up a piece of steel and touches it to my skin?" Makes tattooing seem like a walk in the park. The only other thing you might do that's harder and slower to heal is a navel piercing.

Tattoos: When people ask me how many tattoos I have, I reply, "I don't have tattoos, I am tattooed." After all, once you get everything tied together into a large, cohesive design with background, how do you tell where one tattoo starts and another ends?