by Bethan Jones

Created on: May 27, 2009   Last Updated: May 29, 2009

Reading self piercing stories on bmezine.com, the majority of authors make it out to be really easy. Often using any tool they can find; safety pins, thumb tacks, sewing needles, rather than proper piercing needles they happily push it through their skin or cartilage with no mention of pain or hesitation. The tool goes in, there's a bit of swearing, a bit of blood, the jewelery goes in and everyone's happy (with the exception of the parents). Yet for me it was completely different. it was a lot harder than I thought.

After getting some piercing needles from a friend a few days ago I thought I'd try piercing myself. I decided to pierce my hand web for several reasons; it's a place I can see easily, it's skin so I won't be going through muscle or cartilage and is pretty thin so it's not like doing my lip. I thought it would be easy as I have lots of piercings, and have seen piercings being done many times, so I went ahead and sterilised the top of the fridge, where everything was when I got pierced last time. I lay out a sheet of kitchen paper on to which I placed the packaged needle, a small plate with some lubricant on it, the barbell I was going to use and some Sterets swabs. I held my hand up to the light to look for any veins that might be in the way and marked where I wanted the piercing to go. I then put on a pair of disposable gloves and put the needle in the lube so as to ease it through the skin a bit easier. I cleaned the barbell with one of the swabs and put that on the plate next to the needle. Next I removed one of the gloves (left as that was the hand I was doing) and cleaned the webbing that I would be piercing with another swab.

So far so good.

I then picked up the needle with my gloved hand and realised how much I was shaking. 'That's ok, it's just because I've never done this before,' I thought. I placed the needle against the mark I had made and stood there with the needle resting against my hand for a couple of minutes. It was ridiculous. I mean I've had twenty odd piercings - I know that it doesn't hurt that much. I've been harming myself for years and I know that I can deal with that, but for some reason I just couldn't stop shaking when I was holding the needle. I took some deep breaths to try and calm myself down and then started to push the needle through my skin, very slowly. In hindsight that was my big mistake; if I'd have been able to do it quickly then I think I would have been fine, but I pushed slowly and watched as the needle

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