First post of the new year features a hybrid cutting/brand by NYC’s own Brian Decker.
I think it’s a moth. Which probably means it’s a butterfly. Pretty much any time I say it’s one, it tends to be the other. Either way, it’s really well done.

I received an email the other day asking how practical it would be to fill in a healed scarification with tattooing. I started virtually rummaging through my desktop looking for a picture of my friend Jessa’s amazing moth cutting (by Brian Decker @Pure) that had been tattooed. (by Joy Rumore @1228)

Turns out I didn’t have a picture of it post-tattooing. So I did what any responsible scarification blogger would do; I made plans with Jessa to photograph it. She lives in New York, where I’m currently spending the weekend to celebrate my 1 year anniversary with Claire. On all accounts it should be a piece of cake.

Except Jessa no longer lives in NYC.

That didn’t stop me. As luck would have it, she was going to BE in NYC, so we made dinner plans to catch up and to photograph her moth. Dinner went late, situations made a private spot to photograph the scar/tattoo impossible, so we did what we had to do: Claire followed Jessa into an impossibly dark bathroom barely big enough for one and took pictures for you guys.

The lengths we will go to do document scarification apparently know no bounds. Big thanks to the super lovely Jessa for being so patient, and to my little Claire, who as I type this has been in my life 365 absolutely amazing days. I love you both.

The cutting itself was cut over a tattoo that Jessa wanted to cover up; once the piece healed Joy used the raised scar as an outline and colored in the middle, covering up the original moth and making one of the most striking tattoo/scarification hybrids I’ve ever seen. The photo doesn’t do it justice; I’ll tinker with the raw images in photoshop and see if we can soften some of the harshness of the flash on Jessa’s paler than pale skin