Becky Bond Writes
Cartilage Pierced
My View - Wednesday 22nd July 2020
Getting my cartilage pierced wouldn’t be the first thing on my list of painful pastimes straight after lockdown, but one salon in Leeds was booked back to back with teenage girls as soon as restrictions lifted. My daughter and her friends were in the queue. They had their masks, their money but clearly not their minds as they giddily waited to be needled in the bony part of their ears.
I passed out when I had my ears pierced in the non-agonising lobe region for my 12th birthday. When my niece had hers done, she was so nervous that she wet herself; which was inconvenient for my sister, because they were at The Edinburgh Festival and she had to battle her way through mimes and fire-eaters to find a knicker shop. At least my daughter remained conscious and continent.
The woman in the Leeds salon said the new hole had to be bathed regularly in a salt solution. Apparently table salt, rock salt or that pink stuff in the back of the cupboard I got for Christmas wasn’t good enough. It had to be actual sea salt, from the actual sea, which meant driving to M&S, queuing to get in, then obviously spending five times more than necessary because they had an offer on merlot.
But I’m consoling myself with the fact that at least she doesn’t want a tattoo – yet. Although, I haven’t seen her in a bikini for a while so for all I know, she could have a purple trifid flowering across her back. It’s not like in the olden days when sailors and soldiers inked themselves to prove their heroism, when tattoos meant something. I doubt there’d be many millennials who, seventy years down the line, would want to proudly raise an elasticated trouser leg in the care home cocktail bar to parade their faded fox head.
Or maybe I’m wrong. Or maybe I’m scared. Maybe, I just need to get over myself and start courting new ideas instead of holding onto my stuffy 48-year-old ideals. Would it look so bad if I had an industrial bolt pierced through my tragus? Or a quirky meercat poking out of my cuff? I doubt anyone would care less – employers included.
A huge part of my reticence is the pain factor though. I’m in orbit having my eyebrows plucked. But if I could just go for a nap and wake up with something woke scrawled around my ankle, that would show the yoof how cool I am. I’m thinking some kind of inspirational quote in a Times New Roman font. Wise words to guide my daughters through the choppy seas of adolescence. Something along the lines of: Eat more roughage. Don’t do it on the first date. And always listen to your mother.
Yes, I think that, twinned with a bull ring through my septum would definitely prove I’m not having a midlife crisis. I’ll see you in the care home cocktail bar - mine’s a tequila slammer, with sea salt.
