The 8 Most Horrifying Body Modifications

Tired of your boring old body? Wish you could mutilate it, and stick a bunch of weird shit everywhere?

You're in luck, friend! There is a growing industry dedicated to decorating your body with painful, grotesque trinkets that will frighten every stranger you meet.

There are two things guaranteed to make any one single average person awesome. A tattoo of a skanky chick, or fake boobs. If you look through history's most awesome people--Axl Rose, Genghis Khan, Abraham Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony--they all had skanky tattoos or fake breasts. It's a fact you don't even need to look up.

But if you need proof.

Inexplicably, when Lane Jensen decided to get a tattoo of a skanky chick, and then give it breast implants, he did not enter the pantheon of awesome so much as he just made himself into a creepy weirdo with what appeared to be a leg goiter.

The implants were made from silicone, so they looked and even felt like little leg titties, and for a brief period of time his only discomfort was callused nipples on his calf. However, within a couple of weeks he started producing excess lymphatic fluid and eventually his body rejected them. Or perhaps the universe's own sense of good taste just forbade this sad experiment from continuing any longer.

Dating all the way back to the 1990s, when cutting and depression became fashionable again, corset piercings are, sadly, exactly what they sound like. They're surface piercings meant to emulate the appearance of an actual corset, that delightful piece of lingerie that fetish enthusiasts have kept alive long after most women decided to wear shirts that didn't strangle the breath from their torsos.

The basic idea of a corset piercing is to stab some holes in your back and lace yourself together like a dark and moody shoe. The downside of looking so perfectly Gothic is that the piercings are usually only temporary and will almost inevitably degrade into swollen, infected, nasty holes.

This is due to the fact that poking holes in your back is not a good idea according to researchers at Harvard's Institute of Back Holeology. Permanent piercings are apparently possible, if you're willing to go the extra distance to ensure you have fully healed back holes through which to hang your keys or whatever when you're not being dreary at a club or industrial rave.

You've probably found yourself trapped in an elevator or in line at the supermarket with a bunch of strangers at some point in your life and thought how much easier things would be if you had small metal spikes growing out of your head. You could use them to settle disputes with other males or gore your enemies, for instance.

Fortunately, someone else thought the same thing. Unlike you, however, that person took the time to drill holes in their head and insert threaded metal plugs in which spikes can be screwed.

Transdermal skull implants are the latest thing in having metal jammed into the bone that protects your brain from having metal jammed into it. Potential downsides to getting this particular procedure done are the fact that barely anyone doing it is qualified or trained since there are no qualifications or training for it yet. Also, there are no regulations on how it's done since lawmakers didn't have the foresight to know that one day a body piercer would decide he wanted to become a Triceratops.

She's just as qualified as anyone else.

On the upside this means that, since there are no regulations, when you get yours done by a drunk guy with a hammer and a Black and Decker power drill, you can rest assured that he's technically telling the truth when he says he's doing it right.

Yelling "fire" in a crowded room won't create a stampede as furious as the one escaping an approaching performance artist. Most people would gladly choose a towering inferno of flesh to watching a man shit in a cup and explain why it's an artistic statement.

So it's not entirely surprising to learn that performance artist Stelios Arcadious has had an ear implanted in his forearm. Not content with the power to make people shit where they're standing simply by rolling up his sleeve, he also plans to implant a microphone so people can listen to what his arm-ear is hearing. So pretty much whatever you would hear if you put your head against the man's arm.

"People are going to want to know what my arm sounds like."

The ear was grown in a lab from cultured cells. All so that a man who looks vaguely like Peter Boyle would have something to occupy the audience while they passed his poop cup around. Not your proudest day, Science.