International Body Piercing Day is originally dedicated to Jim Ward, often heralded as “the granddaddy of the body piercing movement”. Jim Ward has been an incredibly influential part of the new body modification movement, with a specific focus on body piercing. He has been part of the forward driving force for piercings in the western world, and helped to develop the basic techniques for piercing, with a special focus on genital piercings.

He is directly responsible for introducing the incredibly popular barbell piercing style to the US, the internal threading style of them was a vast improvement over existing piercing techniques. This technique he picked up from ‘Tattoo Samy’ from Frankfurt, who had come to visit him a number of times in the US after this.

Almost everything you see today in the western body piercing scene can be traced back to Jim Ward. While certainly not the earliest piercer…