Eyeball Tattooing in Medicine and Body Modification
Ink to paper is thoughtful
Ink to flesh, hard-core.
If Shakespeare were a tattooist
We’d appreciate body art more.
Carrie Latet
To tattoo or not to tattoo – that is the question millions of people answered positively. For them getting a tattoo is a way to express themselves, a way to tell the world their personal story. Remember the words of Jack London – “Show me a man with a tattoo and I’ll show you a man with an interesting past”?
Today, tattoo art explores a new part of human body, where tattoo artists could pour out all the creativity. That is the human eyeball. Yes, it sounds scary and bizarre to the highest degree. But have tattoo owners been ever afraid of pain or public denunciation?
The truth is that eyeball tattooing has, actually, two fields of application – medicine and body modification. The first one refers to situations when patients with damaged eyes undergo clinical eyeball tattoo to restore, at least partially, the cosmetic appearance of an eye. Several medical conditions can be treated as direct indications for performing eyeball tattooing. In most cases, this procedure is performed for cosmetic reasons just to mask the damage or trauma of the eye. Medical indications for cosmetic eyeball tattooing include:
- Corneal opacities (this is a condition, when eye cornea gets scarred and loses its transparency, which results in a complete or partial loss of sight);
- Eye damages, resulting from leucoma, keratitis, or cataracts;
- Physical trauma of an eye during a car accident, etc.
However, there are also indications to perform eyeball tattoo, when the procedure can help to improve or restore sight. Some doctors practice this method to help patients with albinism (no color pigment in skin and eyes), keratoconus (impaired shape of an eye cornea), aniridia (absence of the iris in the eyes), coloboma (a hole in one of the eye’s structures), and iridodialysis (separation of the iris).
Body modification is another field, where eyeball tattoo is practiced. Being a relatively novel type of body modification techniques, eyeball tattoo is used as part of extreme experimenting with altering a human body. In 2007 the community of body modification fans was thrilled with the experience of a Canadian man, who had his white eyeballs turned blue as the result of eyeball tattooing. There are also reports of two prisoners, who also gave their votes to eyeball tattoo as their own method to single out from the crowd.
BMEzine, a reputable online magazine of body medication community, published an article, describing the process of eyeball tattoo on a healthy eye. Though, they did warn all the readers on the potential risks of such procedure. Reading comments to the article, it becomes obvious that even for the most advanced body modifiers eyeball tattooing still remains a hardcore experience. By the way, Pauly Unstoppable, one of the pioneers of eyeball tattooing, again has his eyeballs white, based on the photos dated 2010… Did the blue pigment faded away over time or did the man have another eyeball tattoo, this time returning to a natural eyeball color, – this remains unknown…
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