Scarification

IAM:The Fog to The Lord of the Blade, to a BME4LIFEr. 

Ryan Ouellette is a name that will resonate with anyone who has been in the body mod community long enough. His scarification speaks for itself. He’s been around since the early days and, like a lot of people, he found BME at a time when there weren’t many other places to turn for connection or inspiration in body modification. We talked about those early years, the weird and wonderful IAM era, and what it meant — and still means — to be part of this community. 

Oh, and he has a BME tattoo 😉

BME

How did you first find BME?

Ryan

It was 1999 or 2000. I was a ratty body piercer kid on a little island in New Hampshire. I had one piercing friend, and we would watch his Gauntlet VHS tapes, and then pierce each other in his bathroom. 

The phase after that I got a job in a tattoo shop, doing some piercings, but felt really alone so I started looking around online. I don’t know how I found BME, it was probably just word of mouth, but it was just the coolest thing in the world, because up to that point, all we had were tattoo magazines which would maybe have one page of piercing. To see a website that was everything that I wanted to see piercing, and then eventually all the other body mods, was pretty amazing. 

BME  

Did you engage with the community as well?

Ryan

I found BME before I had started, so I was just a lurker at first. I would look at a lot of people’s work. I was just really trying to absorb it and understand what I was seeing for a long time. I don’t think I talked to a single person until IAM happened, and then huge changes happened in my life once that door opened for me.

I got to feel like I was part of a community. I still felt like a weirdo, but I realized that there were other weirdos out there. At the time, I found a romantic partner for several years in my life, and then found all the other practitioners that were out there, on the other side of the world, people I really admired and looked up to.

BME  

Was there anything on or about the site that stuck out to you in particular?

Ryan  

I have all these flashes of memories that pop into my mind, but I really enjoyed learning how to create an online presence, learning how to make a blog that I felt represented the moody goth kid that I was at the time, and just the different ways that you could use the IAM site. 

Around the point that IAM launched, I opened my piercing shop in November of 2000. Then I was seeing scarification, implants, and suspension and all these things for the first time on BME, so I dabbled in lots of different things. Scarification really stuck with me, becoming one of the core things I offered at my shop. I also wasn’t putting my work on my shop website, the only place I was sharing it was BME, because that was the safe place to post something, especially if it was not the best version. 

Now, if you try to post on Facebook or some or Tiktok or something like that, and it’s not immaculate, you’ll get torn apart because there’s no space for growth anymore. You either have to be perfect or you should quit. On BME people wanted to see the good, the bad and the ugly. I didn’t have to hide what I was doing and only post the best of the best. And then finding other people there became this huge overlap for the BME world. We’re here at BMX now and they’re celebrating the 20th anniversary of Scar Wars. Scar wars, was right out of BME forums. There was an IAM scarification forum, and everybody, every single person from Scar Wars was there. 

So we were all sharing our pictures like you would, the way that you would access the coolest stuff on BME. If what you submitted was good enough, you could get certain little member codes, coupon codes and things. And if it was a little bit cooler and could bring in some more traffic for BME, you could get access to the extreme content.

There was this cool thing that Shannon used to do where, if you were one of the top contributors for a certain category, you got a special shirt. I got a shirt that said top scarification contributor in the year a couple of times, and it was, the coolest fucking thing in the world, because there might have only been five or 10 of these ever. At the time, scarification was very primitive, not in the cultural context, but compared to what’s being done today. So everybody who was trying to figure it out was posting on BME.

You’d see all the same names pop up over and over and over again, John Joyce and Jesse V and, all these, all these different people and Decker. Then the IAM scarification form started. And then we could all talk to each other and ask, “what kind of blade are you using? What kind of handle are you using? How are you doing removal? Are you getting good results or bad results? What’s your aftercare?” And that’s basically what BME was. You want to get inspired by something. All the people who are inspirational are here, and they’re doing it, and you can actually just send them a message. BME was also always about acceptance and growth rather than shame. There were some people that were, so comically bad, but they were still welcomed with open arms by the community.

BME 

It sounds like it was a lot less result-driven than by process or love of body modification

Ryan  

Sometimes it was about the results. If you could get a really cool fresh picture, some people didn’t care at all about what the results were. A really, really good example of that exact dynamic was Shannon’s fucking eye tattoo. The bad side of BME was that people thought that there weren’t consequences and now people have lost their eyes. Shannon was really charismatic, so I think it was really fortunate for the planet that he chose to create his cult as a body modification website rather than becoming infamous in another way, since he could just keep people right in the palm of his hand. It was a huge driver for me to just want to be noticed by and impress Shannon. You could be in a room with Shannon and not see him, but feel his presence in a way, which is totally cornball to say, but it was accurate, and it was true. 

I think Rachel gets such a bad rap and also minimized in ways. When Rachel entered the BME sphere, since she wasn’t there on day one, some people saw it as, that’s Shannon’s girlfriend, then it’s Shannon’s wife. But, no, it’s fucking Rachel, she was really cool and really smart. 

I went to the BME fest when they lived in Tweed, Ontario, and met up with them in different parts of the world at different times, and I always felt like they were cool with me, welcoming, and never saw me as less than, which I always really appreciated. It made me feel seen at a time in my life where I desperately wanted to be seen.

BME

I heard Shannon had a nickname for you.

Ryan

He called me Lord of the Blade, and I have a tattoo of it on my side. So, the reason why is because I was a huge fucking nerd, and I loved the Lord of the Rings trilogy when it came out, and I was one of the first people to really dive into skin removal scarification. I did this piece on my shin. All this stuff was all cut out by me. I would constantly do all this stuff to try to pop Shannon. It was a gag, basically. 

There was a point where he would have people try out as BME writers. There’s a person, Dr. Matt Lodder in the UK, does a lot of tattoo history in the UK, and his try out for writing for BME, long before he was a doctor, when he was an emo kid with the hair and everything, was an interview with me about my scarification, and then Shannon titled it Lord of the Blade. I super leaned into it. he was probably making fun of me, but I’ve carried it my whole life. Got it tattooed on me because I was so fucking amazingly proud. 

I got an interview on the front page of BME, and all I had to do was divulge all of my secrets that I worked really hard for. When he posted the interview, I felt like I was opening Pandora’s box because I was just telling people how to do skin removal in an article that was public. I was so desperate to impress Shannon and Rachel that a lot of it came out of that. I know some people will probably say it’s the spirit and all that stuff. But a lot of it was showing off. 

BME 

So when did you start thinking about maybe getting the BME logo tattooed?

Ryan  

Oh, it was because you got free lifetime access to BME. If I was giving any other answer, I’d be completely lying. And I just felt like it. So I don’t want to put too much of, like, a mystical answer on it, or anything. I thought it was cool. I had a spot and I got it.

BME 

That’s as good an answer as any. I think you touched on this a little bit, but how do you think BME affected your career trajectory? If you think it did at all.

Ryan  

It absolutely did. BME was the key that unlocked the door for me. I can look at everything I’ve accomplished, almost like a path all the way back to BME, giving me my shot. You submit so much content, and if Shannon is the one reviewing and moderating and posting and, the hive brain of it all, sometimes he would kick some opportunities your way. There was this one defunct magazine called extreme body mod. They asked Shannon to write some articles, but because Shannon didn’t have the time or the interest or something, he was just like, ‘have Ryan do it.’ So then I got a job writing for this magazine, writing all these articles about heavier body mods. Then that opportunity rolled into, would you want to come and teach a class? And then it was going to the APP conference and knowing everybody, because they’re all on BME, and you’re on BME, and then you have a lot more opportunities in front of you, because you already have these relationships. Now I’ve been teaching classes at APP for over 10 years.

BME  

Is there anything else that you want to add that I maybe haven’t touched on?

Ryan  

Now, in an age when the Internet is so different and it’s so strange, the internet now feels very disposable. Somebody could be prolific on Tiktok, but then they’re gone next week. I lived my life on BME for several years, and that was my thing. That was the website that I would check 20 times a day. That was where my friends were, that was where I dated people, that was where I shared my work, that’s where I learned, and that’s even how I made money sometimes. The internet now is just the hyper-disposable, constant cranking out of content. I almost feel bad for people that have to experience the internet so quickly.

Now, if people are finding body modification, I hope that they’re finding it for reasons that satisfy something deep inside them and not just something to collect. BME always felt like you weren’t picking or choosing. It just bubbled up inside you. Maybe sometimes it was just seeing if you can do a one hook suspension on your ass cheek for the fuck of it. Sometimes it was ‘how much skin can I cut off of a person before they go into shock?’ Sometimes it was ‘how much can I get away with without killing someone?’ It was this internal driver that people might not ever be able to articulate; it was just a feeling they had. And that was what always connected me to Shannon’s energy output, it didn’t feel like he was trying to do things so that other people could appreciate or not appreciate it. He was just like, I’m doing this. You can watch or not watch. And that’s what it was for me. So I would just fucking try stuff. 

So BME, was this really strange and interesting, incredibly personal, soulful website about people cutting their dicks off. It was everything to me for a period, and now it’s incredibly nostalgic, probably to an unhealthy point for me, but it was everything to me for a really long time in my life.