Scarification and Branding

Detailed state-by-state law is covered on the companion page, body art and the law in the United States. This page carries only the six jurisdictions needed to show the four patterns.

One definition is doing a lot of work

Section 119301(f) reaches a mark burned into skin by "a hot iron or other instrument," intended to leave a permanent scar. That is thermal, and specifically hot. Hennepin County's definition of the same word reaches "heat, cold, or any chemical compound."

The techniques enumerated in the clinical literature include cold branding with liquid nitrogen and chemical scarring. On the face of the California statute, those appear to fall outside the Act as well, alongside cutting. No California guidance or enforcement position on that reading was located, and it should be treated as untested rather than settled.

A detail worth keeping: section 119302(a) grounds the tattoo age limit in Penal Code section 653, and section 119302(b) grounds the piercing rule in Penal Code section 652. The branding rule at section 119302(c) cites no Penal Code provision at all. The 18-and-over branding limit originates inside the Act itself.

What applies to scarification instead, stated at the limit of what is verifiable

This is the provision most often invoked online to say that scarification is illegal in California. It will not carry that weight on its own. Decorative scarification on a healthy client is not obviously "treating the sick or afflicted," and whether "operates for ... disfigurement" reaches an elective decorative cut is a live question. No California case applying section 2052 to decorative scarification was located. The exposure is unresolved. It is not established.

Two further provisions sit nearby. Penal Code section 203 defines mayhem as unlawfully and maliciously depriving a person of a member of the body, or disabling, disfiguring or rendering it useless. It is relevant chiefly to skin removal, and it requires the act be done "unlawfully and maliciously." And People v. Samuels (1967) 250 Cal.App.2d 501 states the general California rule that "consent of the victim is not generally a defense to assault or battery, except in a situation involving ordinary physical contact or blows incident to sports such as football, boxing or wrestling."

What BM did not do

BM did not overrule Wilson. The court dealt with Wilson in a single paragraph, opening "For completeness we mention R v Wilson," and branding was not the subject of the holding. Most secondary summaries collapse that distinction and report that branding is now unlawful in England and Wales. The judgment does not say so.

The careful academic reading, from Samantha Pegg of Nottingham Trent University, is that procedures "including scarification, branding, tongue splitting, and ear pointing must fall to be decided on a case by case basis," and that Wilson "must now be thrown into doubt by BM or, at least, restricted to its very particular facts." Pegg also records that the Law Commission, in its 1995 consultation paper Consent in the Criminal Law, "had pointed to the lack of statutory regulation for procedures such as scarification and branding which had left this area of the law unclear."

The defensible statement, and the one this page makes: in England and Wales the lawfulness of consensual scarification and branding remains unsettled, and it has been formally identified as unsettled since 1995. Parliament has not legislated on it since.

Read the intervention description, because it is the only published account of a decorative branding performed under observation:

What that study can and cannot support

• Five subjects. No control group.
• One unblinded scorer rated the scars, using the Vancouver Scar Scale. Totals at three months across the five subjects were 7, 4, 7, 8 and 5.
• The primary outcome was RNA expression, not clinical outcome.
• The intervention itself was uncontrolled. Brand contact time was set by the artist's judgement, which means the exposure varied by an unmeasured amount between subjects.
• No skin phototype was recorded. Subjects are tabulated by age, sex, site and brand temperature only.
• Each site "was injected with 1cc of 2% lidocaine without epinephrine" as part of the research protocol. That is not evidence about ordinary practice, and in at least one US jurisdiction a body-art practitioner may use only nonprescription-strength topical anaesthetics.
• "No adverse events were reported through the course of the study," across five people and three months.

There is no corroborating study, because there is no second study. Anyone citing "the research on branding" is citing this.

This is demonstrable rather than theoretical. A PubMed query for scarification AND randomized controlled trial returns 31 records. All 31 titles were retrieved and read. Every one is a BCG cancer-immunotherapy trial, a smallpox, vaccinia or tularemia vaccine trial, a rhinophyma surgery trial, a bovine keratoconjunctivitis challenge study, or something similar.

Zero concern decorative scarification. Anyone citing "31 studies on scarification" is citing vaccination research and does not know it.

Queries were issued through PubMed's E-utilities API on 29 August 2026. Raw counts on this topic are unusable without title triage, and a figure of the form "N papers on scarification complications" that has not been triaged is wrong by roughly an order of magnitude.

Where evidence could plausibly come from next

One cohort in the world captures the exposure. The Swedish TABOO study, PMID 37142309, BMJ Open 2023, n = 13,049, describes itself as "the first population-based cohort with detailed exposure assessment of decorative, cosmetic, and medical tattoos, piercing, scarification..." Its stated analyses are about tattoos, and no scarification results have been published from it. If a real number ever appears for this subject, this is the most likely source.

Three reasons the convergence is an illusion

1. Both merge hypertrophic scars with keloids. These are different lesions with different behaviour and different treatment. The near-identical figures may reflect the shared merged category rather than a real risk. In the second paper, the abstract drops the word "hypertrophic" that the full text keeps, which is how a merged category becomes a pure keloid rate in downstream citation.
2. Neither population is Western decorative scarification. One is traditional Yoruba marking, mostly performed in infancy with razor blades, with consent given by only 14% of respondents. The other is therapeutic scarification in older adults with chronic pain.
3. In several of these traditions the raised scar is the intended result. This is the decisive point, and it is stated plainly in the literature.

A proportion that counts a sought-after outcome as an adverse event is not a complication rate. That is the strongest single reason not to port these figures onto studio practice, and it is why no keloid percentage appears anywhere else on this page.

The literature itself warns about the mislabelling. Ayeni, Ayeni and Jackson, in the Journal of Cutaneous Medicine and Surgery in 2007, PMID 18042335, note that scarification "results in hypertrophic or atrophic scars, although these types of scars are often mistakenly referred to as keloids." That paper is a narrative review with no quantitative synthesis, and its widely quoted sentence about hepatitis B and HIV risk carries no effect size, despite being cited downstream as though it did.

Population surveys will not fill the gap either. Two skin-disease surveys report scarification marks and keloids as separate prevalences in the same population, in Nyala, Sudan (PMID 31498882, n = 1,802) and rural Cameroon (PMID 22720728, n = 400). Those are not a rate of keloid following scarification and cannot be multiplied into one.

The only clinical advice in the peer-reviewed literature on this question is the AAP's, and it is two sentences long: people who have had keloids, or who have family members with keloids, "should be informed that the outcome of scarification is uncertain," and infections "may be treated similar to other skin and soft tissue infections."

The null results, which are usually left out

• Okafor et al., BMC Gastroenterol 2020, PMID 33126856, n = 142: tattoo and scarification "were not risk factor for distribution of HCV prevalence in the studied population."
• Atontsa et al., Pan Afr Med J 2025, PMID 42078108, n = 114 traditional practitioners, 90.4% of whom performed scarification: "The only factor significantly associated with infection was the practice of traditional autopsies."

How to read the one US number

Murphy's odds ratio of 2.8 is the figure most often lifted into American writing on this subject. Its own authors attached a caution that almost never travels with it:

Questionnaire return rates in that study were 33% and 45%, a differential response between the two groups. Citing the 2.8 without the caution sentence and the response-rate imbalance misuses it. A related problem appears in De Weggheleire et al., PLoS One 2017, PMID 28832660, n = 3,045, which reports "having a tattoo/scarification" as a single combined variable at 1.9 (1.1 to 3.4). That result cannot be attributed to scarification alone.

Serious outcomes in traditional and therapeutic practice

Where decorative Western practice has no documented death, traditional and therapeutic scarification has a documented and serious harm literature.

• Martínez-Campreciós et al., Int J Infect Dis 2024, PMID 38195038, n = 26 anthrax cases in rural Angola: 15 were treated with cutaneous scarification and 9 patients died. Those 9 deaths are 9 of all 26 cases, not 9 of the 15 who were scarified, and the scarification was applied as folk therapy on top of an existing lesion. None of the cases were laboratory-confirmed. It does not generalise to scarification of healthy skin.
• Tsiba et al., Med Trop 2011, PMID 22235631, n = 130 hospitalised children in Congo, median age 17 months: complications were treated in 34 cases, including local infection in 26 and distant infection in 7. That is 26.2% and 5.4%, and it is the clearest denominator-bearing infection figure located anywhere on this subject.
• Emordi et al., J Trop Pediatr 2018, PMID 28605559, n = 2: evisceration following abdominal scarification in neonates.

For decorative branding, the harm literature is single-patient case reports. Karamanoukian et al., J Burn Care Res 2006, PMID 16566546, describes branding as a practice in which "third-degree burns are inflicted on the skin to produce permanent scars," with complications including acute infection, blood-borne pathogen transmission, allergic reactions and burn sequelae. Asif et al., Clin Case Rep 2018, PMID 30656019, reports a solar branding complication that required "surgical excision and grafting."

The most-cited enumeration is the AAP's clinical report, which lists "hot and cold branding (the latter with liquid nitrogen), moxibustion (placing incense on the skin and allowing it to burn until it's extinguished in the skin), cutting with a scalpel, thermo- and electrocautery, and laser branding," and separately describes methods that "enhance scar formation, such as scraping off scabs or irritating the wound with materials such as iodine, citrus juice, or toothpaste."

The two branding case reports enumerate consistently with each other and with the AAP: electrocautery, laser, chemicals, freezing, and hot metal. That is the extent of agreement in the literature. Not one study compares any two of those on any outcome.

There is one point where a regulator and the clinical literature address the same technique. Arkansas rule section 11.12 states: "An artist shall not use chemical or other means to intensify the results of a scarification procedure." That bans precisely the scar-intensification practices the AAP describes.

Outcome predictability, and the gap that should worry people most

The only published statement on predictability is the AAP's bare assertion that "scarification does not produce consistent results and does not always produce the outcomes desired." Its citation traces to a narrative review with no scarification-specific data. The claim is plausible, it is the only such statement in the peer-reviewed literature, and it has no empirical source. It should be read as expert assertion, not as a study finding.

On skin type there is nothing at all. Three separate phototype queries return zero results, and the one prospective study records no phototype. That gap matters more than it first appears: the populations in which scarification has been most studied, and the populations at highest keloid risk, are both predominantly darker-skinned. No study stratifies.

Equipment

Electrocautery devices are regulated medical devices. Under 21 CFR section 878.4400, "an electrosurgical cutting and coagulation device and accessories is a device intended to remove tissue and control bleeding by use of high-frequency electrical current," and the device is Class II. Decorative branding is not the stated intended use. No FDA guidance or enforcement action on decorative use was located, so this page states the classification and stops there.

The accurate framing, which must carry both halves

The organisation sets no technical or procedural standard for scarification and branding, and says so plainly. It does hold a policy position: it supports the right of consenting adults to modify their bodies safely, and it opposes blanket bans, on the reasoning that "reactionary methods such as blanket bans may have the potential to backfire by forcing certain body modification procedures into an underground market."

Those are two different things. "No procedural standard" is not "no position," and "supports adult autonomy" is not "endorses scarification." The two APP pages state the two different things without cross-referencing each other, which is how the "does not endorse" paraphrase got into circulation.

The APP statement's own framing explains why it exists: news coverage of "heavy body modification" and "the arrest and prosecution of practitioners in the United Kingdom and Australia." It is a response to the R v BM prosecution.

NEHA's document is a model code. A model code is not law anywhere until a jurisdiction adopts it. It is a voluntary professional standard, and it is the only one that exists.

Three failure modes shaped how this section was written. Writing about a practice in the past tense when its practitioners are alive. Passing off a museum's interpretive framing as the community's own account. Treating decline as natural attrition when it was frequently driven by law, missionary pressure, labour migration and stigma. Where a source here is a museum rather than an ethnographer, the text says so.

West Africa

Alo and Olasode, writing in the Nigerian Journal of Dermatology in 2018, record that Yoruba tribal marks, known as ila, function primarily "for identification of a person's tribe or family," and that the practice "is fast disappearing due to extant laws and international campaign," adding that "these days, people view those with marks with disdain." That paper contains datable errors elsewhere and is used here only for those points.

The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, as a museum record rather than an ethnographic account, states that "the majority of scarification (known by the Yoruba term kolo) was performed as a statement of citizenship," and offers a causal reading of the decline that belongs to the museum and not to this page: "facial scarification has declined in modern-day Nigeria since the absence of such marks reduces the potential for ethnic tension."

For the Nuer gaar, the citable record is photographic. The Pitt Rivers Southern Sudan Project holds E. E. Evans-Pritchard's own photographs from 1935 and 1936, catalogued with descriptions of "an initiated man with heavy lines of scarification on the forehead" and of an operation that is "a severe one which causes much blood loss, across the forehead from ear to ear." The classic monographs on the Nuer are real scholarship and are listed in the sources below, but no copy could be opened for this page, so not one sentence here is attributed to them. On the Tiv, the same museum record notes that "a Tiv woman's long scars are positioned to catch the light, emphasising the bone structure of her face and the curves of her body."

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australia

The Australian Museum's page carries the following notice, reproduced here as the source requires: "This website may contain names, images and voices of deceased Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples."

That page is valuable because it carries named testimony rather than curatorial paraphrase. It records that "in Australia, scarring was practised widely, but is now restricted almost entirely to parts of Arnhem Land."

Bob Burruwal, Rembarrnga, gives the term in his own language: "We call them bolitj," which the museum glosses as an adornment scar. Doris Fletcher, Kija, of the Kimberley, describes the ending: "Stopped in the 1930s," and "Scars on woman long time ago. This time nothing. Finished."

Papua New Guinea, and a correction worth making carefully

The claim you will find almost everywhere is that Sepik River scarification patterns represent crocodile skin or teeth. That reading is museum exhibition framing and living practitioner testimony. It is not the peer-reviewed ethnographic account, and it is absent from the foundational primary source.

Gregory Bateson's Naven does not say it. The full text was searched for every occurrence of "scarifi" and "crocodile." Bateson uses "crocodile" for the initiatory grade, glossing "nambu wail" as head plus crocodile and noting that "the term wail is used for any initiatory group." He nowhere links the scars to crocodile teeth or skin.

Peer-reviewed sources give a different emic rationale. Christiane Falck, writing in Religions in 2021, records that "a man has to get rid of his mother's blood during initiation to become fully male. He has to detach the gendered substance during a scarification process." Deborah Gewertz, on the Chambri, describes initiation as when "young men receive the hundreds of incisions on their backs, arms, and upper thighs that release the maternal blood that contributed to their fetal development."

And a living practitioner does assert the crocodile reading, in his own voice. Ben Lewis, of Yenchen Village in East Sepik, via the Australian Museum: "I wear the marks of the ancestral crocodile. This is a power mark, a spirit, a security used for protection and connection with the totems and ancestors of my clan."

The honest presentation names both, and treats neither as the single meaning. Practitioner testimony is not less authoritative than ethnography; it is a different kind of source.

Two further corrections come from Bateson's own text. The initiates are small boys rather than young men: "the little boy sits at first in his wau's lap." And he explicitly rejects the stoic-endurance reading that Western accounts favour, writing that "the spirit in which the ceremonies are carried out is neither that of asceticism nor that of carefulness; it is the spirit of irresponsible bullying and swagger... If they scream, some of the initiators go and hammer on the gongs to drown the sound."

The decline is documented twice, sixty years apart. Bateson in the 1930s, on labour migration: "The ceremonial houses were full of boys with no scars on their backs." Falck in 2021: "The last male initiation took place during the 1980s, and the last men's house fell apart during the 1990s." Falck also notes that "Iatmul is not a name used by my interlocutors," which is worth carrying: it is an outsider's label Bateson took from a clan name.

Ethiopia, Sudan and South Sudan

Garve and colleagues, in Tropical Medicine & International Health in 2017, describe regional differences ("while the Nuer have horizontal scars, those of the Dinka are serrated and fanshaped"), therapeutic uses ("the Sudanese Nuba, deep temporal cuts are applied to treat headache"), and the legal pressure the practice is under: "although now forbidden in parts of South Sudan, tradition still dictates scarification." Those authors take an explicitly harm-reduction rather than abolitionist position, and it is worth quoting because it models the register this page tries to keep:

Mursi Online, the Durham University anthropology project, records that Mursi boys and girls "begin to cut small notches into their skin which heal as decorative scars, called kitchoga." The same source carries the single best corrective to exoticising framing, because it shows participants exercising choice: "I came across many married women with unfinished kitchoga, and several such women told me it had either been too 'painful' (waddino) or they had 'forgotten' (dhinyakayino) to finish it."

Legal restriction from inside the traditions

Nigeria's Child's Rights Act 2003, section 24(1), states: "No person shall tattoo or make a skin mark or cause any tattoo or skin mark to be made on a child." Section 24(2) sets a fine not exceeding five thousand naira, imprisonment for a term not exceeding one month, or both. The Act's interpretation section defines "skin mark" as "any ethnic or ritual cuts on the skin which leaves permanent marks."

This is Nigeria legislating on Nigerian practice. The restriction of traditional facial marking is an internal legal and social debate, not an external judgment imposed on the tradition, and it should be read that way. One caveat has to travel with the citation: the Act is federal and requires state-level domestication to have force in each state, and that domestication has been incomplete and contested. Sources conflict on how many states have domesticated it, so this page asserts no number. The difficulty is itself documented in the peer-reviewed literature, in the Nordic Journal of Human Rights in 2021.

Nigeria is not alone. The Pitt Rivers Museum records that "traditional scarification has declined in Africa, Australia and elewhere since the 20th century due to health concerns and politico-cultural changes," and that "the Ivory Coast for example is one of many modern African governments to have banned the practice as 'anti-patriotic tribalism'." The spelling error is the museum's own.

Thomas Phillips, writing in A Journal of a Voyage Made in the Hannibal of London about his 1693 and 1694 voyage, published in 1732, describes embarkation branding: "then we mark'd the slaves we had bought in the breast, or shoulder, with a hot iron, having the letter of the ship's name on it, the place being before anointed with a little palm oil, which caus'd but little pain..." The mark is the ship's initial.

Enslavers described their own marks in newspaper advertisements. Samuel Sherwin, in the Virginia Gazette of 9 May 1771: "he was brought home the 14th, on which day I branded him S on the cheek, and R on the other, though very likely he will endeavour to take them out, or deface them." John Randolph, in the same paper on 3 January 1771, described a man "marked on each Cheek IR, the Letters very dull."

Branding was also a court sentence. Robert Shoemaker, writing for Old Bailey Proceedings Online, records branding on the thumb "with a 'T' for theft, 'F' for felon, or 'M' for murder," that "the branding took place in the courtroom... in front of spectators," and that cheek branding was used from 1699 to 1707 "but this rendered convicts unemployable." The commonly repeated abolition date of 1779 needs two corrections: the statute is 19 Geo. 3 c. 74 and dates itself 26 November 1778, and it was not a clean abolition, because the provision was temporary, expiring in 1784, renewed three times, and only made perpetual on 20 May 1799.

In the French colonies, the Code Noir, article 38, prescribed that a fugitive "who has been on the run for one month... shall have his ears cut off and shall be branded with a fleur de lys on one shoulder," escalating to death on the third offence. In Virginia, under a 1643 law, a person who ran away and was caught a second time "would receive the branded R."

No source was located that explicitly frames historical imposed branding against consensual modern body modification, and the searches that tried returned content-farm material. Rather than invent that citation, this page states who imposed the mark in each case and lets the contrast stand on its own. Claims about Roman branding, Royal African Company branding letters, and French galley-slave marks were checked and dropped: they rest on tertiary sources, on documents that do not contain the passage attributed to them, or on nothing at all.

Statutes, rules and cases

• Safe Body Art Act, Health and Safety Code (California), chapter beginning at section 119300. Provisions read: 119300(b), 119301(c), (e), (f), (t), (w), 119302, 119304 and 119309(j).
• California Business and Professions Code section 2052(a). California Penal Code section 203. People v. Samuels (1967) 250 Cal.App.2d 501.
• Revised Code of Washington 18.300.010(1) and (2).
• Arkansas Department of Health, Rules Pertaining to Body Art, Arkansas Register 007.05.15-004, sections 3.8, 3.11, 3.26, 4.3.2, 4.3.3, 10.3, 11.10, 11.11, 11.12.
• Oregon Revised Statutes 690.350(6) and (8); Oregon Administrative Rule 331-920-0005, "Scarification Prohibited."
• Hennepin County, Minnesota, Body Art Code, sections 2.03, 3.08, 3.09.
• Public Health (Wales) Act 2017, section 57. Mandatory licensing commenced 29 November 2024.
• R v Brown [1994] 1 AC 212 (HL); R v Wilson [1997] QB 47 (CA); R v BM [2018] EWCA Crim 560, read at caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk; R v Adesanya, The Times, 16 and 17 July 1974, cited via Pegg.
• Samantha Pegg, "Not so Clear Cut: The Lawfulness of Body Modifications," Nottingham Trent University repository, irep.ntu.ac.uk.
• Nigeria, Child's Rights Act 2003, section 24 and interpretation section, placng.org.
• 21 CFR section 878.4400, electrosurgical cutting and coagulation device, Class II, Cornell LII.

Clinical and epidemiological literature

• Gabriel VA, McClellan EA, Scheuermann RH. Response of human skin to esthetic scarification. Burns 2014;40(7):1338-44. n = 5. PMID 24582755.
• Breuner CC, Levine DA; AAP Committee on Adolescence. Adolescent and Young Adult Tattooing, Piercing, and Scarification. Pediatrics 2017;140(4):e20161962. PMID 28924063.
• Babatunde OP, Oyeronke AE. Scarification practice and scar complications among the Nigerian Yorubas. Indian J Dermatol Venereol Leprol 2010;76(5):571-2. n = 143. PMID 20827006.
• Npochinto Moumeni I, et al. Therapeutic scarification, shadow pain, and integrative geriatric rehabilitation. Front Pain Res 2026;7:1826721. n = 92. PMID 42338925.
• Ayeni OA, Ayeni OO, Jackson R. Observations on the procedural aspects and health effects of scarification in sub-Saharan Africa. J Cutan Med Surg 2007;11(6):217-21. Narrative review. PMID 18042335.
• Garve R, Garve M, Türp JC, Fobil JN, Meyer CG. Scarification in sub-Saharan Africa: social skin, remedy and medical import. Trop Med Int Health 2017;22(6):708-15. Narrative review. PMID 28380287.
• Makuza JD, et al. BMC Infect Dis 2019;19(1):381. n = 327,360. PMID 31053097.
• Tazinkeng NN, et al. Liver Int 2022;42(11):2396-402. n = 1,144. PMID 35946051.
• Awili HO, et al. Biomed Res Int 2020;2020:8578172. n = 1,000. PMID 32685533.
• Yosef T, et al. Front Glob Womens Health 2024;5:1453231. n = 228. PMID 39469078.
• Murphy EL, et al. Hepatology 2000;31(3):756-62. n = 2,316 matched pairs. PMID 10706569.
• Ngo Y, et al. Rev Epidemiol Sante Publique 2007;55(2):107-12. n = 80 and 240. PMID 17442516.
• Kengne M, et al. Pan Afr Med J 2018;30:125. n = 265. PMID 30374371.
• Okafor IM, et al. BMC Gastroenterol 2020;20(1):360. n = 142. Null result. PMID 33126856.
• Atontsa JDE, et al. Pan Afr Med J 2025;52:192. n = 114. Null result for scarification. PMID 42078108.
• De Weggheleire A, et al. PLoS One 2017;12(8):e0183530. n = 3,045. Combined tattoo and scarification variable. PMID 28832660.
• Uwaezuoke SN, Nneli RO. J Trop Pediatr 2007;53(1):62-3. n = 1 case report. PMID 17208925.
• Martínez-Campreciós J, et al. Impact of traditional cutaneous scarification on anthrax lesions. Int J Infect Dis 2024;140:104-9. n = 26. PMID 38195038.
• Tsiba JB, et al. Scarification in children hospitalized in Congo. Med Trop 2011;71(5):509-10. n = 130. PMID 22235631.
• Emordi VC, et al. Evisceration following Abdominal Scarification in Neonates. J Trop Pediatr 2018;64(3):237-40. n = 2. PMID 28605559.
• Karamanoukian R, et al. Aesthetic skin branding. J Burn Care Res 2006;27(1):108-10. n = 1. PMID 16566546.
• Asif M, et al. Complication of solar branding. Clin Case Rep 2018;7(1):104-6. n = 1. PMID 30656019.
• Kibar Öztürk M. Int J Dermatol 2019;58(11):1341-9. n = 1,802, Nyala, Sudan. PMID 31498882.
• Bissek AC, et al. BMC Dermatol 2012;12:7. n = 400, rural Cameroon. PMID 22720728.
• Nielsen C, et al. The Swedish TABOO cohort. BMJ Open 2023;13(5):e069664. n = 13,049. PMID 37142309.

Professional bodies

• Association of Professional Piercers, about page and Body Modification Statement, released May 2018, updated March 2026.
• Alliance of Professional Tattooists, "What we do not do," safe-tattoos.com.
• National Environmental Health Association, Body Art Model Code, October 2019, and Policy Statement on Body Art, adopted November 2021.

Cultural and historical sources

• Alo AG, Olasode OA. Origin, Types and Cultural Significance of Tribal Marks Amongst The Yoruba Tribe. Nigerian Journal of Dermatology 8(1), June 2018, 7-10.
• Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford: "Scarification in Nigeria" (2011), and the Southern Sudan Project photographic record, photographs by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, 1935-36.
• Australian Museum, "Aboriginal Scarification," updated 5 December 2018, carrying testimony from Yidumduma Bill Harnie, Bob Burruwal, Doris Fletcher and Ben Lewis.
• Bateson G. Naven, 2nd edition, Stanford University Press, 1958; first edition 1936.
• Falck C. Religions 2021;12(4):270. doi:10.3390/rel12040270. Gewertz D, on the Chambri.
• Mursi Online, Department of Anthropology, Durham University.
• Phillips T. A Journal of a Voyage Made in the Hannibal of London, Ann. 1693, 1694, published 1732, p. 218.
• Virginia Runaway Slave Advertisements 1745-1775, National Humanities Center, 2007, from The Geography of Slavery in Virginia, Tom Costa, University of Virginia.
• Shoemaker R. "Punishment Sentences at the Old Bailey," Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 4 March 2022. Statute 19 Geo. 3 c. 74; made perpetual by 39 Geo. 3 c. 45, 20 May 1799.
• Code Noir, article 38, Édit du Roi, Paris, 1687, via the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University. Costa T, Encyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Humanities, updated 26 August 2024.

Further reading, not quoted here

The following are real scholarship that could not be opened for this page and are therefore cited nowhere above: Evans-Pritchard EE, The Nuer (1940); Hutchinson SE, Nuer Dilemmas, University of California Press, 1996; Bohannan P, "Beauty and Scarification Amongst the Tiv," Man 56 (1956), 117; Berns MC, in Rubin A (ed.), Marks of Civilization, UCLA Museum of Cultural History, 1988; Jones CP, "Stigma: Tattooing and Branding in Graeco-Roman Antiquity," Journal of Roman Studies 77 (1987), 139-55.

Researchers and journalists are welcome to quote anything on this page with attribution. If you find an error in it, we would rather hear about it than not.