At A Glance
Author	Asurfael
Contact	asurfael@asurfael.net
IAM	Asurfael
When	Three months ago

I got the idea for piercing the skin between my knuckles from BMEzine. I don't remember exactly where or who from, however. I remember seeing them and thinking it's an interesting idea but not that interesting, and I quickly forgot about it.

I don't remember what brought me back to those, either. I think it was my finger scarification. I was absolutely pleased with how my hands looked like after my scarification. I remember looking at my hand and thinking that two knuckle piercings would look good. Not one, not three, two. It'd make for some bad ass devil horns. The idea started growing on me, and soon I realized I wanted the piercings badly. I waited for a couple of weeks from the idea, and then I finally felt ready.

Of course I had looked up information about them. I checked if there was anything that shouldn't be pierced on the area I was going to pierce, and the only thing I could come up with was veins. Not that bad, really. Also naturally I knew the piercings wouldn't last for long. The skin on the area moves around quite a bit, and your hands get banged around a lot. Also the risk of infection would be greater than in more usual piercings as your hands do get in the way of everything. Actually one of the reasons I wanted to get them done is because I knew they would fail. As such, they'd provide me an excellent example of what can go wrong with piercings. What can I say, I'm curious about such things - reading up on migration and such isn't the same as getting to follow it day by day. For me piercings aren't only about an excellent end result, the way there and what happens when things go wrong are equally as important and a lot more interesting. Piercings being a journey rather than just a cool factor also made me decide I'd pierce them myself.

So one afternoon I set up a relatively clean piercing space in my bathroom. I chose two 1,6/12mm curved barbells and picked four 5mm beads for them. The jewelry had only been worn by me so I thought soaking them in antiseptics would be good enough as far as cleaning the jewelry up goes. I washed my hands and cleaned them with antiseptics. I marked out the spots on my right hand with a surgical skin marker - I'm left handed so the choice came quite naturally - it'd make piercing easier and they'd get in the way less.

I took the sterile needle out of its package, dipped it in Helosan for lubrication, and aligned it with the marks between my index and middle finger. The skin on the hands felt surprisingly tough compared to the my lip or eyebrow, but the needle slid through relatively easily. Very precisely I pushed the needle out exactly where it was supposed to come out. Phew! I could feel endorphins rushing all over my body and I felt slightly dizzy (in a good way). I took my jewelry, also dipped it in Helosan, and inserted it to the needle (the inner diameter of the needle was the same as the outer diameter of my jewelry) and pushed the needle/jewelry combination by the jewelry's bead. As the bead was touching the skin I pulled the needle out entirely and screwed on the bead.

I felt really high on endorphins so I had to take a break before piercing the other one. Not so surprisingly the piercing bled a little, being pierced with a larger needle on a quite vascular area. It wasn't too bad though. I waited for a moment to get my head clear, and repeated the process for the second piercing. This one hurt a bit - apparently I went through a small vein I hadn't noticed looking for veins. Not so surprisingly the piercing between the ring and little finger also bled a bit more than the other one [fresh] (click on the links to see pictures of the piercings at different stages - you might need BME membership to view the images).

After the piercing my knuckles swelled up quite a bit, and they stayed swollen up for 2-3 days. If you want good looking piercings for a night out I don't necessarily recommend this as they'll bleed and be swollen up. I also started noticing the worst side of the knuckle piercings almost immediately. They got caught on everything, especially the left (between index and middle finger) one. The right one wasn't half as bad. Over all they looked very nice in the beginning though [3 days].

Long story made short, you could certainly tell which was the piercing getting caught on things all the time [4 days], [7 days], [10 days], [18 days]. After 4 weeks of having my piercings I tore the left one pretty badly as it got caught on the grating of the fridge shelf [bleeding]. Well, badly is of course relative. The skin was torn by a millimetre [torn]< /font>. Why not worse than that? Well as already pointed out the skin was tough on the area, and by then the piercings had developed huge lumps of scarring in my body's attempt to keep them. The tear healed up pretty quickly, but as it happened I decided I wouldn't keep the piercing for longer than a month. And exactly one month after piercing them I retired my left knuckle piercing [before], [after]. I kept my right one for a while longer, but after going clothes shopping it got a slight infection so I retired it [before], [after]. You really shouldn't retire a piercing if it looks infected, but mine was just slowly becom ing infected and as I didn't have the time to deal with it properly if it did in fact get infected I took it out. I did a couple of salt soaks to squeeze out the lymph from the hole, and it worked fine, and the irritation went away, and the hole healed up well.

That was the story of my piercings, but the my piercings actually taught me a lot. There were a few surprises, and a lot of interesting experience to gain. One of the most surprising things I found to be how they actually healed up in 1,5 weeks. Or well, I don't know if you could call it that because they were migrating. But after 1,5 weeks I didn't get any crusties on them at all, save for when they got badly caught on something. The piercings weren't painful or uncomfortable. Another surprise was that of course, since I had mine on the right hand people would touch the right one when shaking hands. I hadn't thought of that prior to piercing.

I had anticipated migration of course, but I hadn't anticipated the rate they'd migrate at. The right one hadn't actually migrated much, maybe a millimetre or so, but the left one kept getting caught on things and as such migrated quite a bit. 4mm of the 12mm barbell was showing by the time I took it out. I hadn't anticipated the rejection to be that fast, 4-5mm a month. Either way, it was very interesting to follow.

I also got a few surprises as to how people react on them. Your average Joe would of course go "Wow cool!" Anybody who knew anything about piercings would tell me they won't last. A lot of people I thought would know something about piercings kept asking me whether they'd last. Pretty soon I started adding something like "temporary" or "these won't last" or "these are migrating" to every picture I posted of them. Weirdly enough, none of the comments ceased. Only the amount of comments dropped, and some of the "Wow cool!"s changed into "Wow cool, too bad they won't last though." I lost some of my faith in humanity with that, the most obvious people posting comments like "Wow cool, will these last?" to some older pictures without even checking the newer ones that showed nothing more than migration scars. The most annoying part was the little know-it-alls telling me my piercings won't last as if they're better than me, assuming I didn't know it myself (especially when they d idn't even bother to read the description that said "temporary"). Yea, a hair-do won't last forever either, but does that mean it's not worth it ever doing your hair?

Over all I'm very happy with my experience. It was a journey well worth travelling, and I came out one experience (and a lot of first hand experience about piercings) richer. I absolutely adore the scars the piercings left, and I'm thinking about doing a small surface piercing (probably with a straight or a curved barbell) near my wrist to get matching scars there too. I think it would look really good.

As for would I ever do these piercings again... Yes, but as I've gone through the learning process it'd have to be for pretty piercings that would stay then. And I don't see these staying for all that long unless you have practically no use for your hands whatsoever. I guess this means that if I ever become a professional nerd I might redo them and they might last for longer (I still wouldn't consider them permanent piercings though), but I highly doubt I'll ever do them again. Regardless, I'm left with beautiful scars and a lot of fond memories.