As piercing and tattooing have become mainstream to the point of triteness, hook-pulls have mushroomed in popularity. Today, Fakir regularly works with 50 or 100 people at a time, and several groups ...

Fakir Musafar, an icon of the modern body modification culture, died at his home in Menlo Park August 1. He announced in May that he was fighting advanced lung cancer. He was 87. Born Roland Loomis, ...

Fakir Musafar first found pleasure in pain as a teenager named Roland Loomis in his family’s basement in the mid-1940s. It was the beginning of a lifelong passion for piercing, branding, tattooing, ...

Alongside the jewelry in the display cases of Rockstar, the piercing shop on Thayer Street, there hangs a picture of a man with long spikes protruding from each side of his chest. The spikes project ...