I had admired rooks for a long time before I got one of my own – I first saw one back in 1996, when a girl I worked with got one, and I thought it was absolutely adorable. But before I got to those odd little folds of cartilage inside my ear, I concentrated more on the edges. Before I could get my rook pierced, I first had to retire my ear head piercing (this is the front of the upper ear – I believe it is sometimes known as the anti-helix). I took this out in December 2002 without any regrets (the ear head had been done on a whim, whereas the rook was something I had wanted for some time), and waited just over a month before getting the rook on 14th January 2003.
At A Glance Author Titanium Angel Contact Titanium Angel@bme.anon IAM titanium_angel When Five years ago Artist Julie Studio Cold Steel Location London, UK Cold Steel pierce rooks with very small BCRs as standard. Personally I have had a lot of trouble healing cartilage piercings with tiny BCRs (for example my tragus, which was an utter nightmare), but fortunately, as I am a regular customer, my piercer, Julie, makes exceptions to the rules for me. We picked out a plain-polish 16g titanium curved barbell for the piercing. I tried to push for 14g, but Julie wasn't keen on the idea, and since she was being good enough to allow me a barbell, I decided not to push my luck too hard, and agreed to the 16g. In hindsight, I do like how delicate the 16g barbell looks, I don't think I'd want huge chunky balls on a rook piercing; the space is too limited. Julie took a few barbells in to try for size, though in the end we used one with an ID of 8mm, which allowed you to see both the balls, but not the bar. Beautiful.
We went into the piercing room, and Julie cleaned my ear and marked it up, the position was good, nice and deep. I approved it, and lay down on the bench ready. The piercing itself was done freehand, using the needle and a receiving tube. I was quite taken aback at how quickly everything was set up and for the first time ever had to stall for time, just asking a couple of questions while I psyched myself up. I was convinced for some reason that the rook would be abnormally painful, I think because someone had once commented on it being a double fold of cartilage, two potential crunches... after a few seconds, I was ready, took a big breath in, and then exhaled, completely emptying my lungs as Julie pierced.
Then came lots of fiddly bits. The needle was exchanged for a taper, then the taper was exchanged for the barbell. Julie used heaps of lubricant since the barbell was externally threaded, and it went through with no real discomfort. After cleaning away all the lubricant, Julie screwed the ball on very tightly indeed... since it would be a nightmare to retrieve and get back on if it came off! I sat up, looked in the mirror, and declared my new rook to be quite the cutest thing I had ever seen.
Aftercare was fairly simple. I cleaned it with savlon wound wash when it was fresh, then relied more on salt soaks and rinsing in the shower, along with occasional cleans with provon. The piercing was nice and tucked up out of the way, and the barbell was nigh-on impossible to catch on things, so there was no real trauma to hamper healing.
My ear was quite swollen/bruised feeling for a good few weeks afterwards. It wasn't that noticeable, just tender to the touch. As the healing went by, I decided that since the piercing was quite far forward, there might be room to double up the rook. I went back to Cold Steel and made enquiries, and they agreed there would be room, but I would have to wait until all the swelling in the vicinity of the first rook had gone down, in order to make sure that the second rook was optimally positioned.
So I waited, and waited. Its quite amazing how long the swelling around a cartilage piercing takes to completely recede, its actually quite a few weeks. I also encountered a few minor scarring problems (which can be seen here) which prolonged the wait to double up the rook a little longer, I used tea tree oil and salt soaks to help reduce the scarring, and eventually, just under six months after the first piercing, Julie declared the rook ready to double up. I was overjoyed, though I had to wait a few days longer after her declaration, for the correct jewellery to be ordered in.
I returned to Cold Steel on 4th July 2003 for the second rook piercing. I got to Camden a little early, and wandered around the market just trying to calm down and relax – I was a little nervous even about this second one. I know that having had a rook before, I should have known it would be okay, but I knew that the close proximity of the two piercings would make this one a little bit more fiddly than the first. About five minutes before my appointment time, I went into Cold Steel and did the customary paperwork and payment (£20 again, I love that regular customer discount!). The procedure was the same as the first time – cleaning, marking, lay down, line up the receiving tube and needle, big deep breath in, breathe out and pierce, taper, jewellery in, jewellery done up really tightly. Again it was more uncomfortable than actually painful, due to the fiddly nature of transferring from needle to jewellery. Julie and I chatted for a while as she secured the ball tightly on the barbell, then I sat up and got the first glance of my double rook. It was absolutely adorable, two little balls perched next to each other in my somewhat red ear.
After the first night, I awoke with quite a bit of crusted blood inside my ear, but that was easily dealt with in the shower. The ear felt a little tender to start with, though it didn't really swell up until about four days after the piercing was performed, I'm not sure why. I took ibuprofen to mask the soreness and help with the swelling, and did my best not to irritate the new piercing. When the bruising/swelling was at its worst, I found it hard to concentrate – it was like a niggling headache, so I took paracetamol instead, which was better for masking the pain but doesn't work so much on the swelling. I put arnica and comfrey tincture on the back of the ear to help with the bruising – the whole ear felt bruised – and the tincture did worked well (I put it on the back of the ear because you mustn't get the tincture into wounds). I relied more than usual on salt soaks because they felt quite soothing. Soaking was also easier given the proximity of the two piercings, there was barely room to get a cotton bud between the two.
The double rook took quite a long time to settle. Rooks for some reason crust up like nobody's business, and once the second piercing had been added, the crusting phase took a very long time to pass. Patience is of the essence, so I just soaked the piercing with salt water regularly, and did my best not to pick at it too much with my fidgety fingers. You can see a picture of the double rook, (complete with some of its crusting, I'm afraid) here.
I lost the ball off the deepest piercing after about 9 months. Goodness knows how it eased itself undone, but lo and behold it just dropped off one day. It turned out to be just as bad as Julie predicted. No way I could get the ball back on myself, and the rest of the bar slipped out while I tried in vain. So I wrestled in a 16g BCR and got myself on the first possible train to London to get Julie to fix it herself. As inserting the BCR in a terrible panic has caused a little annoyance to the piercing, she put in a slightly longer barbell (10mm internal diameter) which ruined the snug fitting look of the double rook for a while, but we both agreed it was better to be safe than sorry and give the annoyed piercing some breathing space. Within a few weeks, with the assistance of a friend, I was able to put in the old 8mm internal diameter barbell again, and it looked much better.
Thereafter it was largely much of the same, but the piercings never really settled. There were good days and bad days, but on the whole the piercings remained crusty and my problems with hypertrophic scarring persisted, there was an amorphous blob of scar tissue around the top of the piercings, and they both had smaller bumps at the bottom. I tried many aftercare methods – salt soaking, savlon spray, 'X-pression' spray, provon and just leaving the piercings alone, but nothing actually remedied the scarring. I decided to take one of the piercings out in early summer 2006 in the hope that this would allow the remaining piercing would settle. However, by the autumn of 2006, I retired the second of the piercings. I might have persisted longer, but at that point was planning a change in career calling for me to reduce the number of visible piercings I had, hence those least settled were the obvious ones to sacrifice. I also confess I was losing patience with the constant cycles of almost-settling and flaring up. Sometimes you just have to admit defeat.
