Providence body-piercing shop aims to please

Saunders welcomes Sandy into his Thayer Street business, Rockstar Body piercing , and after the necessary paperwork is signed, brings her into a small, clean, brightly illuminated room that has the feel of a doctor’s office. Saunders, 32, says. But not, he says, precisely perpendicular: few faces are perfectly symmetrical, and Saunders must create in his mind an image of the final product. he says. Saunders also must weigh the visual relationship to Sandy’s five previous lip piercings, all on the bottom. Sandy has been pierced 39 times. Saunders says “It’s not a huge difference, one side to the other. Saunders removes a tray containing tools and the jewelry Sandy has chosen from the autoclave, changes into fresh sterile gloves, and cleans his client’s lips with alcohol and an iodine-based antiseptic. he says. Saunders positions a 16-gauge piercing needle. The son of a teacher and a plant manager, Saunders, a Westerly native, was attending the University of Connecticut when his then-girlfriend decided to have her ears pierced, at a now-defunct Thayer Street shop. Leaving college, Saunders began piercing professionally in 1997 and eventually became a partner in Rockstar. Though not for everything, not at his shop, he says. Saunders says he denies requests when he deems the anatomy unsuitable. He won’t pierce fingers or toes, for example, he says, because those parts don’t heal well and they attract dirt; And also, he says, doctors, students, lawyers, businessmen and regular folk, teenager through senior citizen. The oldest, he says, was on the eve of her 80th birthday. “She got her ears pierced and she said the same thing everybody says when they get that. She sat up and said, ‘my mom’s going to kill me.’ ” Like Saunders, Sandy is into tattoos, including one with the word freedom across the top of her chest. she says. she says. At 14, Sandy wanted her nostril pierced. she says. When she reached legal age, Sandy continued with her passion, paying professionals, including Saunders and others, a sum now totaling well over $1,000. Her piercings, she says, have made her “kind of like a little mini-celebrity” “I get people being fascinated and really nice about it and telling me I’m pretty and that it looks really nice to people being very rude and telling me that my face is disgusting and asking me what my mother thinks of me and stuff.” an expert piercer, he says, can minimize pain. Saunders says. he says. she says. Something on the order of 50 more piercings lie ahead, Sandy says: more on her face, her ears, her navel and other places.