I Implanted Chains in My Leg (BodyMod)
Content Warning: Self-harm and body-modification (including healed photos at the bottom that also show self-harm scars)
I wanted a body part I liked, so I put chains in my leg
That sounds like a confident aesthetic choice and it partly was. I like chains. I like them on boots. I like the weight and the sound. Nobody hears chains and thinks they came from the body
They are chosen noise
But I also wanted one part of my body to stop feeling like it was failing
Being trans makes that feeling hard to ignore. It gives me more ways to look at my body and find a fault. Between how I look and how feminine I want to look. Between what has changed and what still feels stuck. Between the body I have and the body I keep imagining I should be closer to by now
But this is not only about being trans
It is also about having a body that feels like something I keep having to manage
So I did something smaller than fixing it
I put two loops of chain in my upper thigh. Part of each chain sits inside my leg. Part hangs outside. Most of the time nobody can see it
It is one patch of skin that no longer has to be judged only as skin
Now it has hardware
The process
The procedure took about half an hour
It was awkward in the way real body things are awkward. Blood kept getting in the way. It made it harder to see exactly how things were sitting and whether the sutures were lying where they needed to
Some of them had to be redone because they had gone under the chain instead of over it. I also had to make a suture pass through the external part of the chain closest to the incision to help hold it in place so it would not slide around too much
That is the kind of detail that makes the whole thing feel less like an aesthetic fantasy and more like what it actually was. A fiddly manual task involving skin, metal, blood and a body position that got uncomfortable after a while
It felt similar to self-harm in the most obvious physical ways. Cutting. Blood. Sutures. Thigh. A new mark
But the emotional reason was different
With self-harm, the wound is usually the event. With this, the wound had a job. It had to become a place where an object crossed the line between outside and inside
Jewelry can come off when the outfit stops working. This could not. The whole point was that the chain had to enter the body, sit there, and heal into place
That was what made it feel real
Not just chain as decoration
Chain as something the body had to negotiate with
Chosen noise
I like the sound of chains because it feels intentional
There are sounds the body makes by accident. Breathing too loudly. Walking heavily. Clothes pulling against the wrong parts of you. Small noises that make you aware you are being perceived before you have chosen how
I hate that kind of attention
Chains are different. If someone hears chains on my boots, they are hearing something I put there. I like the little delay between taking a step and hearing the chain rustle. The attention lands on the object first. It's not my body giving me away, it's the chain doing its job
The implanted chains are like that, but stranger
They are usually hidden. They do not announce themselves the way chains on boots do. I could wear them for weeks and nobody would know unless I chose to show them
That is what makes the idea of attaching a bell to it funny
It would be a tiny noise coming from a body mod no one can see. A stupid little clue attached to something too easy to overthink
I would never attach one, I just like the idea more than I feel comfortable doing it
But I know what I like about it
It would not be my body making noise by accident
It would be my body making noise on purpose
The body I do not think I am getting
I have mostly given up on being comfortable with my reflection
That does not mean I have given up on changing things. I still care about femininity, weight, clothes, skin, proportions, all of it
I just do not think those changes are going to be achievable or give me any lasting peace
I do not think there is a final version where enough things change and my body suddenly stops being a problem
So the goal shifts
If I cannot get the ideal body, maybe I can make a different one
If something is stuck in the uncanny valley, there are two ways out. You can make it more human, or you can go the other way
Remove the humanity until it stops looking like a failed person and starts looking like something else on purpose
That is closer to how I think about my body
I wanted my leg to stop competing in a category it was losing. The chain did not make my thigh thinner, softer, more feminine, or closer to the ideal version. It made it harder to look at as ordinary skin
That is what inhuman means to me here. Not monster. Not darkness. Not trying to sound more interesting than I am
More like refusing the category my body keeps coming up short in
My leg did not become prettier. It became stranger
That was more useful
The chains gave my eye something else to do
I realized part of this from looking back at photos of my self-harm
Not because I was proud of them. Not because I thought they looked beautiful. More because they made the body feel less like who I am and more like material
Skin opened. Blood dried. Tissue damaged
Just meat
I do not want to stay there too long, but that thought is part of why body modification makes sense to me
It makes the body feel less sacred and less personal. Less like I am bad. More like I am stuck inside something bad
I know that is not a clean or healthy thought
But it made the body feel changeable
That is where body modification starts to feel comforting. Not because it teaches me to love my body. More because it gives me a way to act on it
The first time it worked
A few days later, I took the first bandage off
I was in the bathroom. There was no bleeding anymore. The skin was still red and tender. There was scabbing around the incision. It did not look settled yet but It looked like something had happened
I touched the chains carefully at first
Part of me was afraid of pulling too hard. They were attached to me now which sounds obvious but did not feel obvious until I had my fingers on them
The metal was not moving freely yet. Dried blood had clumped some of the links together, so the chain felt a little rigid and stuck. Less like jewelry and more like something caught between object and wound
I kept touching it
I could feel that it was actually there. Not an idea. Not a plan. Not another thing I had saved for some future version of myself who might eventually become the kind of person who did strange things to her body
I had done it
Then I looked at my leg and noticed what my attention did
It went to the object
Not the stubble. Not the fat. Not the skin texture. Not the distance between my actual body and the body I wish I had. Not the feeling of looking like a normal person but wrong
The chain gave my eyes somewhere else to land
For the first few days after, movement still felt risky. Walking felt careful. Shifting position felt delicate. Stretching my leg too far felt like something might pull wrong. The mod was not painful all the time, but it made that part of my body into a task
Then it settled
I could walk without thinking about the sutures. I stopped checking every movement. The chains became less like a wound I was protecting and more like a strange part of my leg
Now it just feels like my normal leg
Which is a stupid sentence because normal legs do not have chains in them
But mine does
Too close to self-harm
The overlap with self-harm is not the point, but it is there
The physical language overlaps. The place overlaps too. My upper thigh already has self-harm scars. I chose that area largely for practical reasons. If the mod rejected or had to be removed, I did not want a new awkward scar somewhere else. Better to keep the damage in a place that was already messy
That is a cold way to think about your own body, but it is also true
The problem is that putting the chains there creates a new kind of attention. If I show the mod, I'll also reveal my scars which are hard to ignore. Someone could see it and think I am trying to make self-harm an aesthetic or that I am asking for concern/attention while pretending I am not
I do not think that is why I did it but I can see how someone might read it that way
A better excuse for being tolerable
The least flattering version of why I did this is that I wanted something on my body to be interesting because I did not trust my body, or myself to be interesting without help
This is a deeply held belief I've been stuck with for years, I used to be bullied and got told to buy people food at lunch in order to play with them. This pattern of behavior is still something I deal with now. I buy people food/drinks when we hang out and I'm incapable of asking someone to split the cost with me when we do/buy something together. I constantly need to give the people around me something objective to justify my presence
Most people would probably decide what kind of person I am as soon as they heard “chains implanted in thigh”
But some people will think it is cool. Some people will think it is interesting. Some people will understand it as a body mod
I feel I am so irredeemable that maybe having something interesting done to me might be a small way for at least someone to be interested in having me around
The body
I do not think I will get the body I wanted
So I am trying to make a new body, even if that means I'm starting with two loops of chain in my upper thigh
Hidden most of the time. Slightly stupid. Hard to explain without sounding worse than I mean to. Too close to self-harm to be simple. Too intentional to be reduced to it
It won't make me fully comfortable in my body but when I looked at my leg in the bathroom, red and tender and scabbed, I didn't just see a body full of faults
I saw something I had changed
I saw hardware
Images
