always wanted a branding, and pictured it done in a sort of Gorean setting, with the brand heated on a campfire. A few years ago, when I was 27, my then- "significant other" and I arranged to do it. This is not the safest or most sanitary or professional way to do a branding, so I would not recommend it to others, but for me, it fulfilled a fantasy, and the experience was incredibly hot. He had an identity symbol he used with his signature, a sort of squiggly "5" taken (so he said, anyway) from Tolkien's Elvish, which we decided to use for the brand. We were camping in a public campground -- we would have liked to find something more private, but we were impatient. The branding was the final part of our coming-together rituals, after he had given me his collar (a chain and padlock) to wear and I, in turn, had given him the key to wear on a dogtag chain. (We were in the BDSM community, and although our relationship and play had little actual Dominance and/ or submission to it -- it was mure purely hedonistic pain- and- sense- play -- we liked the symbols which linked us to the community as well as to each other.) We waited until after dark, when the campground was quiet, and my kids were asleep in their tent. The fire was hot but not high, and it provided the only light. After some kissing and making out, we were ready to begin. I dropped my jeans to my ankles and sat on the picnic table bench. He squatted in front of me, next to the fire, and penned his symbol, somewhere between one and two inches square, on my upper inner thigh. Then he held his knife blade in the flame. I was excited, and though I wanted it, afraid of the blade. I had to keep quiet as he applied the hot metal to my skin. Each stroke was brief, then he would heat the blade again. Bit by bit he covered the penned symbol with burns (a "dot- matrix" style branding). Between strokes he would caress and reassure me. A couple times, we had to stop and move so the view of me was blocked, as other campers walked by with flashlights en route to the restrooms. Because of the time this took and the many firey contacts to my skin, I was quite high on endorphins by the time he finished -- and also quite turned on! I am a masochist, love candle and wax play, and the heat, the dark, the not- totally- private setting, the firelight, the fear, the brief hisses of burning flesh, the pain, and the touches of my lover, were the perfect erotic combination. In spite of the unprofessional way it was done, the brand healed nicely and we were quite pleased with the scar. I simply covered it (during healing) when I had to wear jeans, and left it uncovered whenever I could air it. There was some itching, but otherwise no problems. We had done it just before the weekend of the local pride parade, and it was great fun to wear a mini- skirt to the parade so I could show off the new, bright red mark!
This type of shallow brand lasts about a year, and eventually it did fade. A year later, we decided to do a better brand, this time using a blowtorch to heat shaped ribbons of metal. We used the same symbol again, over the scar of the old brand. For this one, we were indoors at a party, I sat on a couch, and friends held me still to keep me from flinching. My partner held each of the three bent strips of metal in turn in the flame of the torch until it glowed, then touched it to my skin for about a second. Again the healing went fine and we were quite pleased with the results, but eventually (after one or two years) it did fade. The second exprience was again scary -- there is that moment of "what am I, crazy??" when the glowing hot metal approaches my skin -- but again very exciting and erotic. But even though it was a better quality and longer- lasting brand, and it was fun to be the center of attention at the party during the branding, it didn't quite live up to the fantasy- fulfillment value of the first. For me, the experience is at least as important, if not more important, than the actual scar. I hope to have another brand sometime soon, deeper and more permanent. Or perhaps I will stick with the shallower, more temporary ones, as with those, I get to repeat the exerience again and again!