The British and American punk movements of the mid-to-late 1970s adopted tattoos, piercings, scarification, and other forms of body modification as deliberate acts of political and aesthetic resistance against mainstream consumer culture. Figures such as the Sex Pistols, The Clash, and their associates used the modified body as a medium for articulating class anger, nihilism, and rejection of bourgeois aesthetics, transforming body modification from a subcultural curiosity into a visible manifesto. The punk body — spiked, pierced, tattooed, and safety-pinned — became one of the most recognisable political aesthetics of the twentieth century.

Punk's investment of the modified body with political meaning had a direct impact on British and American poetry of the late 1970s and 1980s, particularly in the work of poets associated with working-class and performance traditions. Linton Kwesi Johnson, John Cooper Clarke, and the broader spoken word and poetry slam tradition that emerged in punk's wake treated the body as a political site in ways that drew on punk's body-as-manifesto aesthetic. The connection between punk body modification and lyric resistance remains a thread in contemporary performance poetry.