From The North Liberty Leader
May 14, 1997
Impersonal Effects/Editorial Matters Piercing Ideas, Pointed Concepts and Painful Observations
By James D. Wolf, Jr.
The young lady with the nose ring leaned over the counter in a mixture of surprise and small amounts of shock and distaste.
While waiting to get his navel pierced, my buddy Larry had decided to engage her in a friendly conversation not only about piercings and tattoos, but also about the newer fads of brandings and scarification.
"Those are just. . .," she said, eyes raised. "You really can't get the. . ." She started looking for words.
"Finesse"? I offered. I looked up from the book of tattoos I was going through to pass the time. I hadn't yet gotten to the photo of the approximately 7-inch tall lioness the young lady had on her lower back.
"The detail," she decided.
She was obviously agitated. She originally came from West Africa, where ritual and decorative scarification was common, she told us, and having seen the methods used to do it, she recommended - strongly - against having it done.
I had a hard time following her explanations since she talked quickly and excitedly. But I made out unpleasant descriptions of rough knives, pieces of skin removed, foreign matter put into the skin (to facilitate scarring) and unsanitary conditions. Often scar makers would just pick up a handful of sand and dirt from the floor and rub it into the wound, she said. Bad infections and other damage were common.
Although the graphic descriptions did not appeal to me, the situation did. Larry had managed to find the boundaries of taste and community standards in the shop. And the arguments I heard the young woman using seemed, to me, similar to those used by people against tattoos and piercings.
In return, Larry offered his explanations of the more sanitary methods used in this country, one of which involved application of a mild acid (he is always well researched, often using the World Wide Web for current information), but I decided I really didn't want to pay much more attention. In the words of an old friend, "I'm not into pain - at least not my own. I've been known to inflict it on certain people."
Instead, I looked up at a wall mural featuring a demonic looking tattooist wielding a formidable tattoo gun with a large needle.
Larry agreed with her that brandings can't have the same detailing a tattoo can, although some of the decorative scars could be fairly intricate, he said. He said that he wouldn't get any of them, though, because, unlike piercings, they are permanent. But, he told the young woman, if he would get any, he would consider a brand of an infinity symbol.
She was still dismayed. Someone had recently gotten that symbol tattooed on the back of their neck at the shop, she said. Even though it was too small for detail, she liked the aesthetic contrast of the dark ink against the light skin.
I asked whether she had any tattoos (you couldn't see any, even with the short-sleeved shirt she wore), and she showed us those on her back: one she got before she started working at this parlor, the other was the lioness, which did have fine and subtle detailing and shading.
The men at the parlor do good work, she explained. Her lioness healed in three days with no scabbing, only a sight peeling, like sunburn. The tattoo from elsewhere gave her nothing but trouble.
When the time came, Larry and the piercing expert let me in the room to watch. Larry is an actuary, which is similar to an accountant only better paying and less exciting, as I can figure out, and this was his third piercing. He was doing it to celebrate the end of a professional test he just took. The first piercing, a nipple, he got around the time he got his first actuary job. The second nipple he had pierced the last time he came back to Iowa for an actuary test.
The pain from the navel would be "nothing like the other piercings, man. The worse is over," the man assured Larry. And he finished it before I could read the first full paragraph of a sanitary procedure memo hanging on the wall.
Afterwards, he answered Larry's questions about his own tattoos; all were freehand and used no stencils. The work on his arms and in the photo books showed an impressive craftsmanship, more pleasing than most graphics on T-shirts and more permanent.
Both the tattooist and his mentor, who had done that tattooist's work, have won awards for their designs. And the work shouldn't fade, not as long as they're done right, the tattooist said.
As we left the shop, I noticed a very attractive young lady in her early twenties - very middle-America, middle-class looking - who came in while Larry went through his procedure. She flipped through the display albums, and I wondered if she came for a piercing, for a tattoo or just out of curiosity.
Twenty-five years ago, her forerunner would have shocked her parents by planning an outdoor, barefoot wedding. In the 1920s, it would have been bobbed hair. In the early 1980s, it would have been a mohawk or spiked and colored hair.
Comparatively benign, in my opinion.
Reprinted by permission of Hybrid Publications, Solon, Iowa.