Daniel Hindle, 17, became seriously ill with septicaemia after he and his girlfriend had piercings on the same day. Her eyebrow piercing also became infected.

Daniel, an A-level student from Sheffield, was born with a heart defect but was living a normal life. His mother, Christina Anderson, recalled the moment a doctor told her that her son’s condition was serious. He was admitted to hospital in October 2002 after he developed a fever and vomiting.

"I thought it was something to do with his heart, but he told me Daniel had septicaemia and it was the most severe kind," she said.

"He said Daniel had only a 5 per cent chance of recovery. In effect, he was telling me that Daniel was going to die. It was then that I told him about the lip piercing. Going back over the events he seemed to agree that that would be the cause of the injury."

Ms Anderson said that the first she knew about the piercing was when her son walked through the door with a ring through his lip.

"Daniel was quite proud of it. He thought it looked cool," she said. "My first reaction was shock and horror. ‘Ugh’, I thought. I suppose it’s a normal motherly reaction."

Ms Anderson broke down in the witness box as she told the inquest that her son, a keen snowboarder, was in the "prime of his life". She said that he had been born with a valve missing in his heart, and had needed two operations before he was 5. He had another operation when he was 12 and doctors told the family that Daniel could develop heart problems when he reached puberty. But at his last check-up, in the month before he had his lip pierced, he was given a clean bill of health.

Ms Anderson said that she called out a doctor after Daniel developed a fever nearly two weeks after the piercing, but the locum who answered the call took two minutes to examine him before prescribing medicine for an upset stomach. She said that the doctor did not ask for Daniel’s medical history despite the scar on his chest from his operations. Two days later Daniel started hallucinating and was taken to hospital in an ambulance.

Ms Anderson said that her son’s condition improved at Sheffield Northern General but it later deteriorated. He died on December 21, 2002.

Daniel’s girlfriend, Naomi Storey, 21, told the inquest in Sheffield of her fears about hygiene at the shop where they were given their piercings. She said that the woman piercing her eyebrow had removed the needle’s cap with her mouth. "The cap was put in her mouth when she was getting the clamp ready," she said.

Miss Storey, who met Mr Hindle at their sixth-form college and had been his girlfriend for six months, said that her piercing had become infected after she had left Body Poppers in Sheffield city centre. "It would bleed and it was giving me headaches. It never healed properly and it was never comfortable," she said.

The piercer, Emma Thompson, denied that she had used unsterilised equipment or used her mouth to remove the cap from the needle. "I couldn’t imagine me ever doing that because you need two hands," she said. The jewellery was kept in sterilised plastic packets before it was used.

She said that she had never taken any formal examinations on how to be a piercer but that she had spent three months shadowing a colleague and three months being supervised before she had started working at the salon on her own.

The inquest continues.

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