To pierce or not to pierce?

Seeing as we’re on the subject of culture, I thought I'd delve into a niche of youth culture and ask this question. Whether it disgusts you or fascinates you, it's a subject that's often staring you in the face.

Tattooing and piercing has become more and more popular as its acceptance into the mainstream is reflected in music, art and literature. If you look into recent music trends, and not just in rock music, you'll see a trend of body modification that is gradually opening eyes that were previously closed.

No longer is it just long haired rockers display pieces of art on their skin, but people from all walks of life have been tattooed or pierced. Take 50 Cent and Eminem for instance, their tattoos have become idolised by fans and tattooists since their arrival onto the music scene.

The stigma that tattooing and piercing are strictly for the 'Goth' culture has faded away, with the amount of people getting more complex and exotic piercings, and larger more intricate tattoos.

Only a few years ago, before it was deemed as more acceptable in everyday culture, body modification was seen as pointless mutilation, a way of deliberately alienating yourself from society. But if you look further into the introduction of body modification into culture, it was not such an alien concept.

Mummified bodies, such as Ötzi the Iceman, the oldest mummified corpse to date, have been found with ear piercings up to 11mm in diameter, which is reflected in the expansion of earlobes seen in body modification trends today.

Even today, the expansion and modification of body parts are seen as a part of growing up. In the Mursi tribe of Ethiopia, an exotic and mysterious tribe, the women and men use the expansion of body parts to signal their passage from childhood to adulthood.

So is it still a concept introduced by the rebellious youth, or the resurrection of an age old tradition? It's true that perhaps some people do not understand the origins of piercing in their culture, but the excitement and fascination is causing people to look into it, become more educated and less scared by the unknown.

In a way, it could be argued that perhaps it is a way of separating yourself from the norm, from standing out and defining your character. But some see it as art, as a way of expressing themselves in a way personal to them.

The skills and borders pushed by tattooists are nothing less than phenomenal, the amount of art work and craftsmanship put into a tattoo is the exact amount a master painter would put into creating a masterpiece.

One particular tattooist I admire, Filip Leu, approaches each tattoo he gives to someone with faultless clarity and considers it a rebirth of the skin. So the idea is that tattooing can be seen as a renaissance of the body, rather than the renaissance we observe in study.

So, in modern culture tattooing in particular is seen by many people, including myself, as a form of 'walking art', and a way of recording particular stages of my life in a more intricate way than writing it down in a journal.

I have tattoos to mark important moments in my life where it's changed me in some way, and I can look down at them and remember that I've come out on top. I've also had piercings to mark different stages in life, for example, I had my labret (middle lip) pierced when I first came to University to mark a new stage of freedom, a new kind of liberation to the kind I had back home.

So, there is a new explosion of art that has done the opposite of desecrating culture and stealing the limelight from the classics, but it is defining our generation as a new and exciting era of self expression, and separates us from the rest, so we can look back and say, yes, that was us, we did that, and you can see it all over our bodies.

/Tallie Kane