By Deanna Mae Hostland
I am a professional body piercer from Calgary, Alberta, Canada and have been piercing for 16 years. My job is my passion and my life. As a little girl I always enjoyed performing and my heart was set on becoming a singer. Even though this is not the path my life took, the opportunity to be on stage presented itself later on in life for me, and in a slightly different manner than I had originally planned.
When I was given the chance to perform in Calgary with a variety show I knew I didn’t want it to be just another burlesque performance, so I started thinking about what else I could do. Having taken baton lessons as a girl I realized I could hone my skills and put together a fire spinning routine. I rigged up some homemade torches, taught myself to breathe fire and went from there.
Once I had enough experience with the batons I ordered some fire fans and incorporated those into my sets. I did shows using these and decided I needed to up my game even further. I had performance art fever. I was familiar with play piercing and had pierced myself many times throughout my life. I began brainstorming how I could incorporate fire and piercing; this is when the “Titty Torches” were born!
The idea was to pierce my chest with needles that were threaded at the end to allow mini torches to be attached. I would pierce each side of my chest, light the torches on fire and breathe fire off of them. It took some trial and error and I realized that the fire proved to be a little too close to my face to breathe off of. After some adjustments the idea worked beautifully.
With seven inch long, threaded 14g needles, I pierced my chest three inches deep (I found that any less tissue wouldn’t hold the weight of the torches) on either side, this was always the big finale to my show. These were the last piercings I did after doing three smaller play piercings on either side. Everything was choreographed to music that would fit the theme of the show.
I had opportunities to perform many times in a few years and I never liked to do the same thing, so once again I decided I needed to add a little something else to my sets. This is when I came up with my “Puscifer Piercing Set”. This included three different sets of play piercing and fire that were performed to three different Puscifer songs. It started with seven needles inserted into my arm to the song “Queen B”. It ended when I would pierce each of my thighs four times, then corset them together to the song “V is for Vagina”. This took a lot of precise measuring as I was doing it on myself and being a perfectionist, everything needed to look perfect when the ribbon was tied. The visual was beautiful. I was proud to perform and, although I no longer perform, it was one of the best times in my life. I’ll always have the marks to remember it by.
