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Body tattooing and body piercing are gaining popularity among the young. This phenomenon intrigues and raises questions at the same time. If we put aside the wish to conform with peers that is characteristic of adolescents and young adults, what psychical reality drives them to repeat the practice of body marking over and over, along with the experience of physical pain it involves? Stemming from literature on psychosexual development, body marking and masochism, the position adopted in the present essay suggests that the physical pain associated with body tattooing and body piercing should be placed in the context of normative psychosexual development during adolescence rather than in the context of perversion. More specifically, the thesis developed in this essay proposes that the physical pain inherent to body marking practices is associated with the diffuse psychical pains of adolescence in an attempt to give them sense and to master them.