Piercings and tattoos seem to be a lot more popular today in the Western World than they were back when I was in high school, and they're certainly more popular now than they were before I was born. And by the same token, they are old news to a number of tribal cultures who have piercings that would make most high school kids twitch. And these tribal piercings are considered an important part of their society, a coming of age, and, in some cases, artistic. In our Western society, the people who are inside Society look at piercings and tattoos as something outside of society, something rebellious, and something unattractive. But inside the piercing and tattooing sub-culture (the people outside of Society), they're considered art. Tattoos and piercings are often referred to as body modifications, but more often, they're called body art. A number of people who get pierced and/or tattooed are looking to make art of themselves, they're looking for control over who they are and what they are, the control of an artist over a canvas.

I was in the fourth grade when I got my first piercings. They weren't anything exciting by today's standards, but for a fourth grade girl who was the only girl in her class who still didn't have her ears pierced they were exciting: little gold posts with tiny pieces of topaz centered in them. When I got those done I wasn't thinking about art, I wasn't thinking about control, I wasn't thinking about anything more than fitting in and being cool. Fourth graders are pretty hung up on being cool.

Since then, I've added a few more. In high school, having two holes in your earlobes was cool (and if fourth graders were hung up on cool, high school kids were neurotic about it). I wanted more than that, though. I added another pair of ear rings to each ear lobe, and a third piercing to my left. Back then, no one asked me why I did it. Ears were okay to pierce, I was still cool, and I never gave a thought to art or control. Even when I had the cartilage of my left ear pierced, people didn't look askance at me. There weren't sidelong glances until I got my tongue pierced, and then more when I got my eyebrow pierced. The other rings I've got in my ears (each tragus is pierced and the conch of my left ear is also pierced) draw incredulous stares and "Didn't that hurt?" questions which were followed by assertations that it must have, even though I said, "No."

Sometime between fourth grade and college, I stepped out of the social realm of "cool" and into the realm of art, out of the mainstream and into the misunderstood. When I stopped poking holes to go with the crowd, when I stopped thinking, "Well, all the other kids are doing it so it must be cool." When I started thinking about what I was really doing and why, I started making conscious decisions about what I wanted to do with my body, what I wanted my body to look like. Those decisions included metal, they included ink, they included hair dye, henna, and sometimes makeup. It wasn't about cool anymore, it was about art.

At this point I'm pretty well known at work because of my piercings. Some of the people don't know me personally, but if they hear my name, their immediate response is, "Oh, that chick with the metal through her face who wears black all the time." Whether they consider me a work of art is probably up for debate, and whether they consider the modifications I've chosen to make to my body art is also likely up for debate. (If you want to debate it, however, remember that art doesn't equal beauty and beauty doesn't equate to art.) But art has always been misunderstood, and artists have been misunderstood as well, often branded as madmen, lunatics, heretics… that's the way life goes. Life and art are both what you make of them and people shouldn't blame the artist or the canvas for the message they interpret from either.

So there you go, Mr. Wilde... I've got both suggestions down pat. I am a work of art, and I wear the art of several different tattoo and piercing artists. I am canvas and artist both and wherever I am in the world, my museum, The Museum of Me, is right there.

For more information about body modifications, you can go to BME, an e-zine dedicated to information about various forms of body modifications and art.