At A Glance
Author	Toni
Contact	boondock_saintess17@yahoo.com
When	Three months ago
Artist	Damien
Studio	Flesh Chamber
Location	Appleton, WI

The Background:

To start, I'd like to say that I love almost all forms of body modification, but piercing is my baby. Especially surface piercing. I've had close to 60 surface piercings, and while most of them rejected I've altered my personal physical health by taking huge daily amounts of fish oil and flaxseed oil and the surface I now have are doing great.

I have this passion for weird and unique piercings, which has fueled many surface projects, but my favorite thus far is my scalp piercing. "But that's your head! Why would you do that? Didn't that hurt?! Did it bleed all over?" It goes like this. I am an apprentice piercer in the best shop in my area, the Flesh Chamber. Sometimes we get bored. Really bored. I hadn't been pierced in almost a month, so I decided to make Damien pierce me. Damien is my "boss" and my best friend. We brain-stormed for almost an hour... it would appear that just about anywhere you can get pierced I've got a healthy amount of scar tissue from rejection.

I'm sprawled out on this couch of sorts that we have, and I bump my head while adjusting myself. Light bulb goes on! "Damien! Can we pierce my head?" Damien looks at me like I am insane. I tell him that I am serious, and he gets the pensive look that I love so much. We hit the computer to see if it had been done, and upon finding nothing on BME or the world wide web in general I am dead set that this is going to happen. We think about the risks, what we could damage, and don't come up with anything too terrifying. DONE!

The Process:

Damien asks me to pick a barbell length, and I choose 3/4", which he bends for me. He sets everything up, and I sit down to let him mark me. The first set of marks was too close to my forehead. Second attempt: perfect. By this point I'm starting to freak out a little bit. I'm poking myself in the head and pinching myself trying to get a feel for the pain. I have a pretty resilient head, and can fall off stairs and land on cement without even a headache, but that's blunt force trauma, not a piercing needle! Damien has lost a lot of his patience with me and my constant freaking out before piercings over the last year, so commands me so sit. Which I promptly do, and give him to ok to start. Damien freehands all of his surface, which is awesome. So much less equipment, so much less time in the chair.

So I am expecting this insanely sharp, almost unbearable pain, but he starts with the entrance and I feel next to nothing. HUGE amounts of pressure, and a slight dull ache. The needle has gone in, and come back out, and I hardly felt it. I did feel a lot of Damien pushing though. At this point Damien puts in my jewelry, and cleans it up a bit, which is unnecessary as it didn't bleed at all. I jump up to look and it is the most fantastic thing I've ever seen. A pierced head! Who would have thought? I will tell you that for the rest of the night I had a terrible pressure headache. I went home to bed, and when I woke up the next day I couldn't even feel it, and haven't had a problem since. No, I don't catch it when I brush my hair. No, it is not hard to clean. I shampoo and condition like always, I just hit it with a little bit of anti-bacterial soap before I get out of the shower. I spray it with H2Ocean after I style my hair. I occasionally make Damien clean it off with q-tips and sea salt solution at work, just for good measure. It is healing beautifully, never red or nasty. No pain. Just perfect. I love it.

The Reactions:

The funniest part of this whole thing to me is how people have reacted. I'll walk into a gas station or a store and some middle-aged woman will tentatively ask me if my head is pierced. I'll confirm that it is, in fact, pierced, and she'll usually say "Oh, that's kind of cute!" So, now I show her the two 1 1/2" surface bars I have on my lower back and she freaks out. This is the reaction I've gotten from many, many people. WHY? Don't you people understand that my head is really rare, and not even common in the piercing community, but my surface are basic, been-done-a-hundred-times-not-special nothings!?! It is frustrating, and funny at the same time.

The Conclusion:

I recommend scalp piercings to anyone who wants to be cool. Ok, just kidding. I like it because I have found no proof that anyone else in the world has it. I like to be unique. Just make sure you trust your piercer before you let them go crazy with you. I trust Damien with my life, and I know he wouldn't attempt anything he wasn't comfortable with. Thanks for reading. Cheers!