I am an apprentice at Gotham Body Piercing in New York City. I've been here for six months, and I've been privileged enough to work with two excellent piercers, Sean Mcmanus (iam xeon) and Eli Levi. For some time now, I've been craving a ladder of surface piercings up my right forearm, so a little over a month ago, Eli and I decided to pierce my wrist for starters.
At A Glance Author sedgwick Contact pershall@hotmail.com IAM sedgwick When A month ago Artist eli levi Studio gotham new york Location chelsea, new york city My friends Ellie and Samantha were in that day, being my willing guinea pigs as ever. I did a double nostril piercing on Samantha and a septum on Ellie, and while I was working on them we were discussing surface piercings. I told them what I wanted to do with my forearm, and since Eli was there supervising me, we decided it was as good a time as any to do the wrist piercing. That way, Ellie would be able to photograph it for me, and she and Samantha would be able to watch.
After some debate, Eli decided to do the piercing with a 12 gauge, 1/2" surface barbell. We autoclaved the jewelry and as Samantha, Ellie and I chatted, Eli marked my wrist. He had me stand naturally, with my arms at my sides, and he took a long time to do the marking. When we were finally satisfied with the placement, I sat on the table and Eli cleaned my wrist with Technicare and sterile gauze. He used forceps to clamp the marks, lubricated the needle with Technicare, and smoothly slid the needle through. I was a bit nervous and was prepared for the piercing to hurt, but it was really easy. I watched the entire procedure with no problem. There was a fair amount of blood afterwards, but by that evening the holes had scabbed over nicely and I began doing salt water soaks.
What I found within the first week of healing was that the surface barbell, because the ends protruded about 1/4" from the holes, got caught on EVERYTHING. Because of this, I couldn't seem to keep the piercing from bleeding. After about a week of dealing with that, I decided to visit my friend Pam (iam spiderlilly) at Elm Street Tattoo while on a trip to Dallas to visit my boyfriend. Pam suggested that we make a trip to Obscurities to get some tygon (plastic tubing) and switch out the surface barbell.
We got a couple inches of 13 gauge tygon from Obscurities, took it back to Elm Street, and autoclaved it. Pam demonstrated her substantial transfer skills by using a concave taper to get the tygon through (she was out of clean pin tapers and decided she was up for the challenge.) We put in the 12 gauge beads, and all was well for several days. The piercing made great leaps toward healing -- that is, until the beads started to fall out.
I've heard many different theories on the best way to deal with tygon in surface piercings. Of course, it is preferable to use a surgical stainless steel surface barbell initially, but I far prefer the tygon now that the piercing is healing. I know some people use super glue to keep the beads in the tubing, but this to me seems a bit risky. Obviously, you DO NOT want to get super glue into a healing wound. You also don't want to have the beads sit so close to your skin that it's difficult to pull the tygon out enough to cut off the bead should you want to remove the piercing. In my experience, using significantly larger-gauge beads works the best. The tygon is very stretchy and it holds the beads well provided they're large enough. Also, remember that tygon CAN be safely autoclaved, so, as with all jewelry, make sure it's sterile before you put it into your body.
Back in New York, Eli switched the 12 gauge beads for 10 gauge beads, and that more or less solved the problem. My experience with tygon has shown that it's really a lovely material, but that you need significantly larger beads (of course, it's important to make sure your beads are from an INTERNALLY threaded barbell!) than you have tubing. The piercing is now almost six weeks old, and it's healing fabulously. It has required very diligent aftercare (I highly recommend Satin antimicrobial soap and twice-daily sea salt water soaks), but it's worth it. It shows no signs of migrating so far. I plan to continue the ladder up my arm as soon as I'm confident that this one really will heal successfully (at least another month), but at this point I feel I can safely recommend the piercing to anyone who's interested. I've been looking at a lot of surface piercings in the last couple of months, and I've seen some really lovely work done on abdomens, arms (I saw a beautiful, intr icate piece on a woman's upper arm at the APP convention in las vegas), and napes, among other locations. Most of them seemed to be healing well. If you make sure your piercer knows what he or she is doing, pay careful attention to your aftercare, and do some research into the materials you're putting into your body, there's no reason why you can't successfully heal a surface piercing.