Is there a distinct fashion aspect to tatoos, piercings and other forms of body modifications? As in fashion-as-fashion, rather than fad-style socio/politico manifestation of whatever? Can it be possible given how near permanant things like tatoos are meant to be, as opposed to seasonal, ephemeral fashion? Definitely an interesting question!

There's a book by photographer Housk Randall entitled "Revelations" which has some strong B+W studio portraits of Torture Garden type people that could be a reference of sorts for you. Otherwise, there are quite a few publications available, in which if nothing else you'll learn about things like tatoo conventions, artists to approach & where etc - but then there's this new mag http://www.sang-bleu.com/ that might be most up-market-y?

Hope this helps as a starting point.

First of all it’s nice to have Flux here again, I hope that all is well with you Flux.
Plymouth is a navel base, for many years it has been a tradition for people to have tattoos in Navel towns.
A few years ago I started to take pictures of some of the body adornments, Navel guys or marines usually have pictures related to there regiments or friends tattooed on them, where as Plymouth youth go for cartoon characters pop groups or any other theme that is trendy at the time.( not sure that this is a good move)
I hope that these pictures are of use to you, if you lived near a navel town it would be easy to do your project, good luck C
Adam

Adam Beatles

Adam Tattoos

Adam Tattoos

Garry at 18 Garry started getting tattoos at 16

Mathiew from the Projects series