A healed/fresh one-two punch from Syracuse New York’s own John J. Joyce.
John says that the healed work is around five years old, and that the fresh work provided quite a challenge.

Technology is a wonderful thing; yesterday I got a text from John Joyce telling me to check my email which was about to be filled with amazing pictures of Ryann’s leg. Healed and fresh!

John said that the healed cuttings are around three months old. I’ll see if we can get Ryann to send us another healing update as these newest additions settle in.

It’s been far too long since I’ve featured new work by Scarab’s John Joyce.
You can reach John via the SCARAB link on the sidebar!

I’m a big fan of letting the works speak for itself; mainly because I’m lazy and hate writing entries. Thankfully the lovely Ryann was kind enough to type up some thoughts for the scarblog. We usually show the fun part of Scarification; the pretty cuttings and branding. Ryann didn’t shy away from the nasty bits of healing… so read up. If you’re planning a cutting, it’s always good to know what to expect!

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Often times you will see the freshly done scar, and the years plus follow up pictures of them. Rarely do you see or hear about the middle stage, the healing of these works of art. First, a little about me. I’m a 27 year old lovely lady who’s been getting cut by John Joyce of Scarab Body for the past few years now. I have a fair amount of tattoos, saw some various scarification pictures over the years, and this seemed like a natural progression for myself. I do not thrive on pain, I do not enjoy it. The finished product is beautiful and that’s what I seek.

More after the break!

I’m currently healing my fifth serious cutting, a series of lotus flowers down the side of my thigh. First things first, I bleed, I bleed a lot. I expect that my cutting will bleed for the first 24-36 hours after it is done. This makes for a fantastic 4 hour drive home from Scarab, note the sarcasm. Yes, my beige seats in my car have been spotted with blood.. oops!

One of the worst parts of my healing process is when I first get home. Water on a fresh cutting hurts, like a searing burning, “I want to vomit/faint”, pain. I refuse to shower until the day after the cutting. Like I said, I do not like pain. This cutting was actually the most simple one to clean up initially. For the first time I did not feel like I was going to pass out in my shower. Or maybe I am really just getting used to this by now.

On to the fun part! I keep my new cutting covered in vaseline and saran wrap, for at least 7 days. This is the part that I hate, and that makes me feel like my skin in crawling. I’m yet to experience my body being so uncomfortable than I do at this stage. Now, there’s so many various ways of healing up cuttings that I’ve read and heard about. I’m a sissy. There is no way I can splash lemon juice, pour salt, or red wine vinegar on my already sore, fresh open cut. Do those methods help some people get the really heavy keloid scarring they want? Yes, but that’s not how I scar, or what I aesthetically prefer.

After I clean it off in the shower with soap, removing as much of the vaseline as I can because heat rash is imminent, and the excess blood, not to mention the blood clots either! I pat it dry and pour Hydrogen Peroxide all over. I have a small baby style tooth brush, that is a bit softer than a normal one, that I’ll then use to irritate the cuts. After about 5-7 days I’ll start irritating it more in the shower. This is proving very difficult this time.

Have you ever tried to look at the side and back of your thigh and ass?? It’s not that easy! Anyways, once the cut is beat up enough, I pat it dry. I use sugar to help irritate it more, and sugar does not burn like salt does. Hooray! More vaseline, more sugar, then it’s wrapped back up and taped all around. It is an ordeal, it takes me 15-25 minutes to do this, 4-6 times a day. Finished product right? Ask me how I am on day 6! An angry, uncomfortable mess.

The worst part truly starts right away. From the blood running down my body, to when it finally subsides the plasma, wetness that’s been accumulating under the wrapping, all runs down my body. This is the part I find the most uncomfortable. It affects the way you sit, sleep, walk, live for the first week. I’m constantly changing my pants, because the icky wetness has reeked havok on my clothes. This is not the good kind of wetness we’re talking about here! But I digress. At this point, even just 3 days into healing, my body is pissed off that it has been stuck and irritated with tape over and over, is constantly wet, sore, and now is starting to get itchy.

I will put up with this for the next week, JUST until I can tell the heat rash is about to kick in. For me this seems to happen around day 8-11. Thankfully soon as I stop covering it, there’s no more leakage! Relief! For the most part. Now it’s just a constant battle of dealing with vaseline seeping into my pants, using the trusty kids toothbrush to mess with my fresh cutting, and not scratching at it hard enough to tear it up, but just enough to relieve the itchiness. I will itch for the next month like I have scabies.

All in the name of beauty.

Fresh cutting by John Joyce

I’ve been sitting on these pictures for a bit now; no particular reason just haven’t had time to get everything together and update the ScarBlog.

John did this piece on Misty, who I met a few months ago at APP (after sort of meeting her in Dallas) in Vegas. The photos were taken by Kiley Rae www.kapturethis.com.

Claire and I will be taking off in a few days for the 2010 ROP BBQ. Expect off-topic photos when we get back!

Rose Cutting by John Joyce

I have a bunch of new work by John Joyce that’s going to be posted over the next several days; tonight’s post is of a traditional style rose cutting. I’m going to be heading up to Mr. Joyce’s for a cutting in the next few weeks, so perhaps we’ll also have a video update!

The Philadelphia Tattoo Arts Convention is coming up again; March 26th-28th 2010. John J. Joyce is considering attending/cutting again this year so I’m spreading the word: If you’d like to be cut by John in Philadelphia you can contact him through the Scarab Website. Every person who gets cut by John at the convention will get a drawing of a monkey by either my girlfriend or my nephew as a present.

This reminder comes with another Gogo appearance; again from SW3 in Philly back in 2007, Photographed by Casey Goldsmith.

I have lots to say when it comes to John Joyce; that he can control the weather by touching his beard, that he knows when you’ve been bad or good (so be good, for goodness sakes) or more truthfully that he’s one of the best scarification artists in the world. Most importantly though, I can say that John is my friend. And that’s pretty goddamned awesome.

Happy birthday JJJ.

When I was preparing the second SW in late 2005 I received a letter in the mail from a young lady who was confirming her invite for the West Coast event. Most people took care of that online, but Sam went oldschool with actual mail and, in a move that I still find adorable, included a photocopy of her driver’s license so I’d be able to recognize her at the event.

I was fortunate enough to have booked my friend Rachel (owner of BME and all around renaissance woman*) as the portrait photographer for that event; while the photo on Sam’s driver’s license was good, the pictures Rachel captured of her are, I think, much more flattering. (I think I still have that photocopy somewhere)

(PS: you can see more of Sam here, here, here and here. Her lotus cutting was done by John Joyce and Brian Decker.

*Rachel would like it mention that, despite my claim of her being a renaissance woman, she will not be eating any turkey legs at the Renn Faire.

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.

This piece was done at Scar Wars 3 in Philadelphia in 2007, which means in this photo it is almost 2 years old. Sam scars so much more dramatically than the average person, which is part of the reason that I love working on her. I have some pics of her other side which will go up when I get back from Vegas!