John started this piece at Xanadont (my humble South Philadelphia estate) with the koi and added the cherry blossoms at SW3. The piece features cross-hatch shading and was photographed by Atom Moore.

Tattoo iconography is fairly common in scarification design choices, but scarification is not tattooing. (obviously)
I’ve seen a lot of posts recently on tattoo blogs/message boards referencing the scarwars.net site, saying that they don’t like tattooing being associated with scarification. I’m sure it further confuses things when the designs are based in tattoo art. I guess we should be flattered; I remember when the tattoo community wanted nothing to do with body piercing; piercers being threatened at Dave Yurkew’s Texas tattoo convention in the late seventies, tattoo magazines distancing themselves from piercing/modification content. It’s come full circle (Steve Haworth did Enigma’s first generation horns at the 20th anniversary of Dave’s convention back in 1995, on the convention floor; Tattoo Savage has been in print for almost two decades) so I guess it’s expected that scarification, sharing the same graphic nature of tattooing, is an easy target for people who feel that what they do is ok but what we do is “gross mutilation” (they seemed to be particularly humored by someone saying that they wished they could scar like Sam) so… yeah. That’s that.

It will be a slow process to get scarification accepted in the body art community… but we’re doing what we can.