Brendan McCarthy – aka Dr Evil – ran Dr. Evil’s Body Modification Emporium in Wolverhampton from 2012 to 2015, where he carried out extreme body modification. In 2015, Wolverhampton Council argued that McCarthy didn’t have licence to perform procedures “akin to cosmetic surgery.” On the twenty first of March this 12 months, McCarthy was charged with six accounts of wounding, one being the removal of a customer’s ear, and handed a 40-month prison sentence in a ruling that senior Crown prosecutor Rhiannon Jones has called “a landmark case involving body modification.”

While the case could also be unique, body modification has been happening around the globe for an estimated 10,000 years — although only began to actually take off within the West within the Nineteen Sixties – and artists have been performing these ‘extreme’ procedures within the UK for a long time.

While there aren’t any specific qualifications for body modification procedures equivalent to tongue splitting, scarification, branding and ear pointing, Dr Evil had undertaken what he called “extensive training” within the UK, Europe and America and had trained with a number of the top artists in the sphere. Until this case, body modification had flown completely under the radar within the UK and only now’s it coming into the attention of the law.

Body Art (also known by his legal name The King of Ink Land King Body Art The Extreme Ink-Ite) is one in all the UK’s most tattooed people. He knows Brendan and has had body modifications performed by him prior to now. The transdermal implant in Body Art’s head was one in all the procedures undertaken by Brendan. It consists of an object placed partially below and partially above the skin – an anchor is implanted underneath the skin, with a step protruding from the surface of the encircling skin, in order that changeable jewellery might be screwed into the threaded hole within the step of the anchor.

“To me, [body modification] is about overall freedom,” Body Art explains. “Some people say freedom of expression. But for most individuals, it’s also about control over your body. We’re a community. We’re transformers of our bodies.”

Body Art thinks that there just isn’t enough understanding around his community. “There’s no Royal College of Body Modification. There are the GMC (General Medical Council) that oversee regulations and stuff. However the medical world, and the judicial world, they only don’t agree with what we do,” he says. “So society formulates a discrimination. It’s a sort of discrimination because people like ourselves are being ignored. On this case, they didn’t take heed to the defence. They don’t take heed to us.”

Tattoo artist Hannya Jayne, one other former customer, began a petition to drop the costs McCarthy is currently facing. “For us within the West, body modification is more of a fashion thing. It’s about self-expression and owning your personal body,” explains Hannya. “I feel so far more comfortable in my very own body, I mean I’m quite heavily tattooed as well. And I just feel comfortable, I feel, that I look form of how I should look if that makes any sense.”

As with all surgical procedures, there are very real risks related to invasive procedures like body modifications. Having a component of your body removed, or a foreign body added, may cause severe trauma and introduce high infection risks. Local infections, transmission of bloodborne pathogens, and distant infections are all high risks with any body modification procedure.

Dr Samantha Pegg, a law lecturer at Nottingham Trent University, told the BBC, “Practitioners have assumed that extreme body modifications, as types of body adornment, were lawful when consent was given. Although the law has long accepted that tattooing and piercing are lawful activities there has not — until this case — been any consideration of other types of body modification equivalent to tongue splitting.” The confusion surrounding the practices is what has allowed them to fly under the radar for thus long. That is usually how the community likes it, too. Body modification is a distinct segment world, and plenty of prefer to keep it to themselves. Knowing they are sometimes misunderstood, practitioners aren’t at all times easy to seek out.

The conviction of Brendan McCarthy has shaken your entire community of body modification fanatics. McCarthy was unapologetically practising something, with written consent, that he genuinely didn’t consider was illegal. “A friend of mine, he’s having night terrors — he can’t sleep. He keeps having flashbacks to the court itself when Brendan was taken away,” Body Art tells me. “There’s a combination of deep sadness and sympathy for him and his family, but in addition a number of anger due to the way in which it’s been handled.”

“I feel a number of individuals are quite offended,” said Hannya Jayne. “I mean, even my mum who hasn’t got any tattoos, she’s not into that sort of stuff, she is annoyed about it and thinks you need to give you the option to decide on what you do along with your own body, as long as you’re not hurting people. I feel we as the general public don’t love to be told what to do.”

The conviction of McCarthy was described by prosecutors as a ‘deterrent’. But to suggest that following this case, body modification goes to vanish could be vastly ignorant. There’s a really real fear that this case will simply serve to drive body modification further underground — meaning that it should happen in additional unsanitary environments, and by the hands of those that are inexperienced.

There’s currently no recognised body within the UK to observe body modification. Nonetheless, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) oversees surgical procedures across the board. In court, it was argued that Brendan McCarthy was essentially practising medical procedures with no licence. But when there isn’t a specific training for tongue splitting or silicone implants, the one option would then to undertake surgical training. A surgical trainee within the UK will spend a median of £18,000 on their training. To turn out to be a surgeon generally includes 4 years of undergraduate study, 4 years of medical school, and three to eight years of surgical residency in a hospital. McCarthy had none of those qualifications but was a totally trained tattoo artist and piercer. Training to be a piercer averages out at around £400, while training to be a tattoo artist costs around £5000.

“I’ve at all times had conversations with Brendan and other practitioners about regulation,” says Body Art. “People don’t at all times want change because they’re comfortable. But this does have to occur for our community. Brendan might be the one which, when he comes out, is the very best person to assist formulate change.”

Regardless of the opinions of the law in relation to body modification, it is evident that this is just not a community that’s going to vanish. McCarthy never had a single criticism from his customers, who still swear by his work and credit him for making them feel more comfortable in their very own skin. To dismiss and outlaw body modification could be to dismiss a whole section of the population for simply wanting to be themselves.