It's been more than four years since anyone stuck a needle in me for non-medical reasons. I still had a vague idea that I might get more tattoos done at some point, but I was fairly sure that I was done with piercings.
Then, all of a sudden, over the last few days I have found myself wondering whether maybe my body doesn't need a few more holes in it after all.
So I've made an appointment to get snakebites done on Friday.
I'm still not sure this is a good idea. My existing piercings are fairly discreet: only my rook is visible with a shirt on and my mouth closed, and that's not particularly prominent. OK, my nipple bar can sometimes be seen through T-shirts if they're a bit tight and light-coloured, and people can see that my tongue is pierced if I stick it out, but normally they aren't really visible. And I quite like that I have these features that people don't necessarily see unless I choose to reveal them.
Snakebites, meanwhile, will be immediately visible to anyone, all the time. So I'll be losing that element of subtlety if nothing else. Work-wise I don't think they'll be a problem at my current job but I don't know about future jobs. I might have to see about taking them out temporarily for interviews.
I also wonder whether maybe I'm getting too old for new facial piercings. I'll be forty in a few months. Is this a look that I can pull off or is a piercing that was popular with mid-00s Emo kids going to look stupid on someone who was slightly too old for that scene at the time, let alone a decade and a half later?
So who knows? Maybe this is a terrible idea. But I just really want to make some sort of change and this seems like a good one to go for. Sure, if I really want to make a positive change to how my body looks, I ought to try and lose some weight. But that's going to take a while, so in the meantime I'll try sticking some more metal in my face and see how that goes.
If the past few years have taught me anything, it's that it is not always better to regret something you did do than something you didn't. But in this case I'm just going to say 'fuck it' and do it anyway. After all, the worst that's likely to happen is that I don't like them, take them out and they heal up. They'll leave marks but they shouldn't be that noticeable and should mostly be hidden by my beard anyway.