Beyond Body Piercing

From Wired News: Shannon Larratt was a child when he first dreamed about modifying his body. When his father would make pizza and sit with him to watch Star Trek, Larratt was captivated by the diverse looks of people from other worlds. He was particularly taken with the forehead ridges.

In Larratt's ideal world, "Everyone looks interesting, everyone looks different." So when body modification artist Steve Haworth invented a way to implant jewelry under human skin, Larratt jumped on the opportunity.

After Haworth was done, Larratt's forehead sported two symmetrical ridges that stretched at a jaunty angle from a spot above his temples down toward his eyebrows.

Larratt was an early adopter of subdermal implants, a form of 3-D body modification pioneered in 1994 at Haworth's piercing shop in Phoenix, Arizona. The first human canvas for the art form was a woman from New Zealand who came in and asked for a bracelet. Haworth pondered the challenge, then suggested that he could place series of beads under the skin around her wrist. She enthusiastically agreed.