Etch-a-sketch

These days future scarification artists can apprentice with someone like Moidib, but most current practitioners are self-taught, often learning by trial and error. Steve Joyner of Obscurities Precision Piercing, located off Cedar Springs in Oak Lawn, has been cutting for more than five years, learning his craft when he was in the Army while sidelining as a body piercer. A friend asked him to scar his arm with a series of triangles. "It had symbolic significance for him," Joyner recalls. Although reluctant, he agreed to do it under the supervision of an orthopedic surgeon. "Later I started going to medical courses to learn more about the skin. I was just putting two and two together."

Joyner, a 29-year-old Native American, has always been interested in primitive cultures and their rituals and sees his scarification work as an extension of that interest. Something of a multicultural man himself, Joyner has tattoos, brandings, and piercings representing at least 14 other cultures, yet he refuses to scar himself. "I'm just not willing to go that far," he says.

But he says that those people he sees at Obscurities who want to get scarred (he cuts about one a month) fall into four categories. The majority who enter that part of the tattoo parlor marked "Lab" tell him they want to scar themselves as a means of personal expression. ("Rather than use ink and color, they want their body to be the art," Joyner says.) Others want scarification as a rite of passage or a cultural ritual. ("A man came into the store and wanted to commemorate his divorce...A schoolteacher who was Cherokee wanted the back of her ear marked because that showed her faithfulness to her husband in the Cherokee tribe.") Yet others see it as a mental rush. ("The endorphin and adrenaline release that it causes is the most intense high you can get naturally.") Then there's the leather-and-bondage crowd who use it as part of their sexual play. ("People mark themselves with other people's initials to show who owns who.")

Even though there are only four cutters in the Dallas area, Joyner is concerned that they practice their art form in an ethical fashion. He regrets that in Texas there are no specific regulations for those who engage in scarification other than requiring practitioners to work in a licensed tattoo studio -- a fact that seems strange to him, since tattooing and scarification are hardly similar. He is working with the state health department to write piercing regulations, and would also like to see tougher rules (though not as stringent as some states, which outlaw the practice altogether) and mandatory training to prevent just anyone from wielding a scalpel.

"I can cut you very deeply, very quickly with a scalpel," he points out.

Twenty-seven-year-old Robert-Michael possesses a constant, subtle smile, as if he knows something that he's not going to tell you. Teasing your attention, he communicates in low rumbles that make him easy to misunderstand. He wears baggy fatigue pants, and his blond dreads (definitely not his natural color) sprout haphazardly over his agreeable face, which is accented by 16 piercings in his eyebrows, nose, lips, and ears. Bold black tribal tattoos traverse his back, arms, and chest. Fascinated with body art at a young age, Robert scarred his own arm when he was 13 and exchanged brandings with a friend at 16. On his left forearm is a work of Moidib, a pattern of lines and arrows derived from traditional South African designs. Rugged yet smooth to the touch, the pattern has faded in the year since it was first cut. "I don't scar well; I'm white," he says with a grin.

With scarification, the darker your skin, the better you'll form scars and keloids. (Note the brandings sported by some black fraternity men.) So it makes sense that scarification is more prominent in cultures closer to the equator, where people tend to be melanin-rich, defeating the visibility of tattoos.

Why, then, would the light-skinned bother getting scarred? The answer, Robert-Michael says, lies as much in the process of scarification as in the outcome, in the sense that this is a test in transcending pain. It is somewhere in the moment before your flesh senses the cold blade descending, when the whole of you centers on that one place where your body will be forced to heal itself.

Although it might seem that those who scar themselves would be clinically depressed or bent on self-mutilation, like some victims of sexual abuse who cut themselves, Robert-Michael sees this as more a means of self-expression and identity. "It's pretty much bringing outside something that's already there."

Renee Angelica, an Austin teenager, has recently encircled her arm with dotted line cuttings and is still scabbing over. "When people see it, they think you must be suicidal or depressed, but it's not," she says. "It's a natural thing for me." And Angelica was pleasantly surprised that the process didn't hurt her all that much. She's planning more dotted lines -- around her arms, her ankles, maybe her chest -- to acquire that sewn-back-together look a la The Nightmare Before Christmas.