“You know, you’ve got beautiful nipples for piercing,” she said. “Yeah,” he replied. Zac was nervous—his voice unnecessarily loud and shaky. “You should do three to four piercings in these nipples,” she said. How old was he? Eighteen. Ever been to Saint Sabrina’s before? No. How long had he had the lip ring? About a year. Plans for later that Friday night? The overnight shift at a Chaska gas station. “Are you nervous?” she asked gently. “Yeah, a little,” he said.
Zac laid back, drew several deep breaths, then winced and moaned as Jesika Bornsen pierced both his nipples in a matter of seconds. Bornsen, a beautifully tattooed and pierced twenty-nine-year-old, is well versed in the art of being sensitive to people’s fears. After seven and a half years as a piercer, she’s seen clients do it all—panic, vomit, cry, faint. There’s still a large chip out of a wood display case outside her piercing room where it intercepted a client’s boyfriend’s head, after he passed out.
“The person on my table is the most important thing to me,” she explained the other day, while disinfecting the gray gurney. “I have to walk them from a place of fear to a place of calm.” This takes a lot of energy, and it explains the high rate of turnover in the profession. A lot of what piercers see and hear does not constitute a pleasant experience. Stretch marks and cuts on thirteen-year-old bellies. Poor hygiene. Botched DIY jobs. They see much evidence of lives littered with bad decisions and bad luck.
A large woman in her forties came in and wanted Bornsen to pierce a nipple and her clitoral hood. The woman wanted privacy. When I returned, Bornsen had another client about to get an “industrial”—a piercing that has two points of entry through one area. The girl and her friend looked like college freshmen, their pale pure complexions virginal in the presence of Bornsen’s tattoos and nine facial piercings.
As Bornsen pierced her ear, the girl curled her toes, her flip-flops clamped against her heels, but she didn’t make a sound. A few moments later, after asking Bornsen about genital piercings, the girl sat, then stood. “You all right? You look a little pale. Grab a sucker,” Bornsen said, pointing to a “Mother” coffee mug filled with red lollipops. “The sugar helps.” It’s no wonder she’s busy with modish young women who have delicate questions. Between Fargo and Chicago, Bornsen is the only female member of the Association of Professional Piercers.
Bornsen led me to the sterilizing room, where she logs many hours disinfecting and packaging jewelry and needles. “This is a really important part of it all,” she said. Sterilization education becomes very important when you consider that many piercers stick themselves with needles just as often as, if not more than, medical professionals. Bornsen told me about the time she got stuck with a needle while piercing the head of a client’s penis: “It was horrible. My finger was attached to this guy’s penis with a needle. He was cool though, and offered to go get tested.” (Everything checked out just fine.)
A tall blond woman came into Bornsen’s room for a navel ring consultation—also a big part of a piercer’s job. “My boyfriend’s a surgeon and can’t wait to get his hands on me,” she said. But the woman’s bellybutton was shallow and lopsided, and Bornsen said it could barely be done without puncturing the umbilicus, a major source of blood supply for the intestines. She advised her to have it done by a professional piercer and not her boyfriend.
When the woman left, Bornsen began to giggle. “I’m just picturing this romantic scenario with her on the bed, and her boyfriend pierces the umbilicus, and all this blood starts squirting out,” she said. With her finger, she mimicked the blood pulsing. “I can guarantee you that she won’t have her navel pierced anywhere else.” —Erin Madsen
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