DiscoverSYR: Scarab Body Art Studios

This worldly tattoo and piercing shop will scar you for life--if you ask.

By Nate Hopper | Photos by Liz Reyes

In many ways, Scarab Body Art Studios reflects the tattoos etched onto its owner, John Joyce. Both the swaths of black Polynesian symbols swirling around his torso and the foreign statuettes and masks nodding down from the walls embody an appreciation for centuries of tattooing and piercing tradition. And like the spirals crawling around John's back, the studio also represents transformation and reverence.

The walls are not plastered with tattoo flash—the pictures of cookie-cutter designs indigenous to most shops and a trap Joyce himself fell prey to at 17 years old. He stumbled into a shop, had a design from off the wall inked onto him for the first time, and hated the tattoo within six months. That mistake inspired Joyce's rule that Scarab's artists must customize each design to a client's personal idea.

Today, boxier blackwork covers that first tattoo—the only part of Joyce's design without a direct connection to Polynesian symbolism. His respect for tribal cultures grows from the time he spent on his grandfather's lap as a child, gaping at issues of National Geographic and pinching his nose as he wondered how septum piercing works. Now his shop offers piercing and massage (Joyce is a licensed masseuse), sells jewelry, and practices a tradition much older than tattoos: scarification, in which the artist cuts a design into someone's skin, leaving a scar behind.

The process isn't as gory or savage as it sounds. Many compare the pain and bloodletting to the outlining stage of a tattoo. And when Joyce works on a scar, his scalpel looks more like a feather sliding across the skin than a knife slicing into it.The history of body modification— before anesthesia and saline wipes, when scars and tattoos commemorated a first kill or a marriage, or only marked sailors and criminals in Western society— is more brutal than the present.The same goes for the history of Scarab's building: the bricks of Joyce's studio, now glazed over with white paint, used to enclose a slaughterhouse.