Being a long time reader of BME, I've always been intrigued by all of the hand surface piercings. Every time a picture update would occur on BME, I would go back and look through all of the hand piercings again and again. One night, at yoga practice, the instructor was talking about lines of energy, and had us pinch the piece of flesh between our ring finger and pinky fingers. As it is also a pressure point, I could feel it tingle all the way up my arm and into my elbow. For some reason, that cemented my decision to get a piercing there. I sat on that thought for several months making sure it was something I really wanted.
At A Glance Author hojita When A month ago Artist T Studio Dogstar Tattoo Location Durham, NC, USA I called up T at Dogstar, and we made an appointment to look at my hand, and then to order some correctly sized jewelry for it. I've had nearly all of my piercings done by T, and I recommend her highly if you're in the Triangle area in North Carolina. I went to Dogstar, and with a flashlight she shined through all of the webbing on my fingers. Sadly, every single webbing on each hand had a vein running through it, except for the thumb webbings. There are large arteries that run through the hand and up each of the fingers, and I can only assume that these are the larger veins that come back from those. T let me know it was probably not a good idea to pierce through a vein in the hand, but Mike, the other piercer, thought it wouldn't be that big of a deal. At that point, it didn't matter, because I didn't have any jewelry. I had however resized my vertical labrets much shorter in the recent past, and so I had some fairly short curved barbells. T and I both had thought that using that would heal much better than using a circular barbell.
I came back to Dogstar a week or few later to get my hand pierced. With most of the piercers at the store, she took the flashlight and shined it through. She finally decided that there was a point on my finger webbing that the barbell could go through without hitting the vein, even though it wasn't very deep. She went to clamp it, and when she clamped it, the pressure pushed the vein out of the way, and there was nothing there to get in the way of the piercing. She pushed the needle through, and there I had my wonderful fingerweb piercing.
I think I have a fairly high pain tolerance, because it really didn't hurt that much at all. It wasn't the rush of feeling that my lips felt when getting pierced or the sharp pain of cartilege that I felt. The feeling of getting my hand pierced was more a weird ache than any sharp pain. It's very hard to describe.
I went back home and took the rest of the night relaxing and playing on my Playstation. The piercing didn't get in the way, and it gave me a chance to take my mind off of it. In the same way that pinching the webbing between your fingers makes your whole arm tingle, my arm and elbow of my left hand felt very strange that first night. The feeling went away after that, but it was still a very odd feeling. Even now the feeling of this little piece of metal between my fingers is a very interesting feeling. It's like I'm trying to hold something between them, but it never goes away.
The piercing itself has been healing rather well. I've been soaking it once or twice a day with sea salt and every two days or so I'll rotate the jewelry through with a little soap to make sure it doesn't get infected.
Surprisingly, it doesn't really get in the way very much. You'd think with a piercing on your hand that you'd be constantly hitting every little thing with it, but not terribly so. As it's between my ring and pinky fingers, it doesn't get in the way of much, and I don't move those fingers around as much as I would my thumb if I had gotten a thumb web piercing. I can still type with absolutely no problems. The only time I've really disturbed it is when I've tried to climb a ladder or when I've gotten out of a chair and set all my weight down on the piercing as I push myself up. But, I'm much more aware of my hand now, and it doesn't happen as much now.
One of the things I like about this piercing is that it's extremely subtle. I've had it for about three weeks now, and people that I see just about every day still come up to me and ask when I got it done as if they had never seen it before. There have been several occaisions where I'll bang my hand and make a face. Then, somebody will ask me what's wrong, and I'll hold up my hand palm out and show them, and ten to one they'll ask me another two or three times what's wrong as they look confusedly at my hand, not seeing anything. It's certainly not hidden by any means, but nobody seems to really be able to see it.