by Bethan Jones

Created on: May 27, 2009

A few months a little over two years ago me and my then boyfriend had a 'talk'. It was one of those talks; the kind that ends with tears and sometimes broken hearts. The gist of the conversation was that he didn't feel attracted to me anymore, and one of the reasons he gave for that was my body mods, my piercings and tattoos.

This conversation hurt for a variety of reasons. Primarily the guy that I'd been in love with for over a year wasn't attracted to me any more. That's going to hurt anyone and invariably make you question what's wrong with you. But it also hurt because the guy who'd told me he'd love me no matter what found my mods, the things that I loved, unattractive, ugly; a turn off.

There were other things going wrong in the relationship, which in hindsight I can recognise, but I focused on my mods. If he didn't like them then should I take them out? Should I not get any more? I had countless conversations with myself, debating the pros and cons of removing some of my piercings, and tried to think what life would be like if I couldn't have any more tattoos or piercings, much less the implants and surface piercings, the more extreme mods, that I also wanted.

For a while I tried, I really did, to not think about mods, to ignore the itch for a new piercing or a new tattoo, but it was a lot harder than I thought it would be. By this point I'd already had numerous piercings and five tattoos. Becoming modified, while not being an addiction, had become the norm for me and, being immersed in BME and a member of the IAM community, as well as having modified friends, made it all the more difficult to avoid the issue or just stop thinking about it.

A few months later, after unsuccessfully trying to ignore any desire for more piercings or tattoos, I found a piece of text that I really wanted engraved on my skin. I'd been at home in Wales for a few days as me and the boyfriend were having problems and enough was enough. I went to my studio and got myself tattooed. Returning to Bath I told my boyfriend that I couldn't stop getting mods; asking me to stop getting tattoos and piercings would have been like asking him to never play computer games again. I couldn't do it. He said he understood.

For a while things continued in much the same vein. Thinking we'd reached some kind of understanding, and working on the issues we were having, I refrained from getting any more mods, but purely for financial reasons. One day, browsing BME, I came across some photos of

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