Sometimes being a writer has its advantages, for instance I managed to have a really great time while also doing "research" for this article! We (my girlfriend Rebecca and I) traveled to New York to attend the Third Annual New York City Tattoo and Body Piercing Convention.
It has been a mere three years since the city of New York lifted the law that banned tattooing and well — New York is a city of excesses and this convention was excessive in all the most wonderful ways!
The art represented in the old Roseland Ballroom over the weekend was incredible and the artistic energy and talent was so thick you could almost taste it! The Hell's Angels were friendly and there was sword swallowing, fire eating, music, tattoo contests and hot, skimpily clad — despite the cool damp weather — tattooed "eye candy" bodies everywhere you looked! We had a terrific time!
We also checked out the Body Art exhibit at the Museum of Natural History. It spanned human body modification from prehistoric through modern times and included a diverse and strange combination of body modification such as Chinese foot binding, corsetry and waist training, African lip plates, neck stretching and huge ear lobe plugs to ancient and current day tattoos, piercing, branding and scarification.
Myself a tattoo artist and body piercer, I really like going to conventions and meeting other artists from all over. The majority of the "best of the best" as far as tattoo artists from all over the world were in attendance, either working or networking, like me! I met a diverse number of especially cool artists and handed out hundreds of business cards! Plus, I got two happening new tattoos!
I also met many fabulous artists who are doing ground-breaking designs with modern primitive body modifications such as branding, scarification, extreme piercing and permanent implants. I understand that the government is now attempting to regulate the body mod industry and that would be a shame. Just as they took the healing arts away from the healers, witches and shamans, now they want to take away the healing, spiritual and sexual experiences of body modification and give it to the doctors too!
Amazingly things have not changed much in the realm of body modification. People are still doing a lot of the same things that we were doing several hundred and in some cases, thousands of years ago! Wow, how did people get away with doing this stuff for so long without the so-called "experts" regulating it? What's next? If you want to do S/m sex you have to go to a doctor to get tied up "properly" and have pain and pleasure administered in a way that is highly regulated and doled out in a measured way so that you won't become "too dependent" on it? Crazy!!
On another day we went to a small gallery in midtown, to an art show called The Skin Within for a showing of paintings and other art by some of NYC's premier tattoo artists. Everyone from Paul Booth to H.R. Giger was represented there! And the prices were typical NYC yikes! With paintings ranging from $300.00— $14,000.00! It is always interesting for me to see an artist of one medium expressing themselves in another and while the art at the show was diverse, some good, some great and some just so-so, this is as true with tattoos as it is with paintings or sculpture.
The tattoo convention, galleries and museums were only part of our reasons for wanting to go to New York at this time and so we did most of the other wonderfully depraved and fun things we could find to do! For instance, we went to a lot of the local fetish clothing shops. The New York shops have great names, like Religious Sex, DeMask, London and Purple Passion! After shopping we had to go to the S/m cafés and I began to take notice that everywhere we went, people were tattooed and pierced!
This was especially apparent in a large amount of the bare costuming for the Black and Blue Ball, which is a huge (800-1000 people attended) S/m, fetish, goth, vampyre event hosted by the ladies of Arena Blaze Dungeon. The body art was again incredible; and people think nothing of spending thousands on an outfit for a large event such as this one! Lots of dark demonic and gothic gargoyles, pentagrams, Baphomet and other assorted angels and devils! Celtic knot work seems as popular in NYC as it is here in Seattle! This all got me to thinking; What is the connection between body art, the craft, S/mers, fetishists, vampires and Goths? It seems all of these groups have an atypically large amount of body mods and I just wonder what are the common denominators?
Since we are still doing a lot of the same things as far as body modification or maybe it would be more accurate to say we've come back around to doing some of the things our ancestors did, I think that this is significant. This is partly what I was looking for, this connection between the past and the present as well as the common thread between these various subcultures — that they all get tattooed and pierced, some of them extensively!
I have a theory about people born in the time period when the planet Neptune was residing in the sign of Scorpio. I feel that for people with this in their astrological birth chart, it has brought out all the hidden, secret, sexual Scorpionic stuff and related it to the Neptunian, spiritual and social issues of this time. A lot of people born during that time tend to be a little more "out there" about their expression of sex and kink related stuff. These people are mostly 30-40 right now and so they are the people that a lot of the fashions and trends are revolving around. So, sexuality has changed and tattooing and piercing is a more acceptable means of expression as is S/m or fetishes. Madonna is an example of a person who exemplifies this in her chart.
The things that I noticed that stood out were the facts that people had a sense of not fitting in or not belonging to the main stream culture. They were choosing to express themselves in ways quite different from their parents, whether it was sexually with S/m and fetish actions or spiritually with the Craft or socially with the gothic or vampyre scene.
I asked a lot of questions and didn't get too many of the same answers, people seem to have their individual reasons to get tattooed and/or pierced. Some people do it on a whim, others think about it for years before they are ready to commit. But if you ask 100 people why they got tattoos, piercings or other body modifications, you'll get a hundred different answers. To be different, to fit in with their peers, as an expression of their personality, as an demonstration of their spirituality, as a manifestation of their sexuality, as a way to mark an important life passage, as a memorial, as an expression of dedication to a path or a person or a personal change. All of these are good reasons to mark yourself and I am sure there are many others that do not come to mind at the moment. I for one, am glad to be living in a time when positive personal expression of sex, individuality and spirituality can be whatever is appropriate for an individual.
Sylvana SilverWitch is high priestess of Sylvan Grove, publisher of Widdershins, an S/m practitioner and educator, a pleasure activist and a professional tattoo artist and body piercer.
She will be doing several workshops at the Living In Leather conference, held June 29 through July 2.
She can be contacted at 206-608-9908 for personal consultations or at Emerald City Tattoo; 206-368-7362 for appointments for tattoos or piercings.
[Home Page | Other Articles in This Issue | FAQ | Local Resources]