The History of Eyeball Tattooing

Though many people treat eyeball tattoo as the newfangled type of body modification, the history of this particular type of tattoo art dates back to ancient times. The first records of eyeball tattooing belong to the second century AD. An ancient Roman physician and philosopher, known as Galen of Pergamum, is said to be the first, who practiced and described eyeball tattoo as the method to fix certain eye defects and leucoma among them.

Eyeball tattoo continued to evolve during the subsequent centuries, but, unfortunately, we do not have records about the development of this technique until the 19th century. In 1869 Luis von Wecker, an ophthalmologist and surgeon, introduced a new method of eyeball tattooing, which became a prototype of modern eyeball tattooing methods. During his operations, Dr. Wecker covered the cornea of an eye with the layer of ink solution and then used a needle to let ink under the cornea.

During further development of eyeball tattoo, new enhanced instruments were developed and tested in practical applications. For example, Dr. Wecker later used an instrument, designed by Taylor, in which a bundle of needles was used instead of a single one.

Instead of covering the whole surface of cornea with ink, Dr. Armaignac used a small funnel to supply ink to the eyeball. As the result, he managed to create perfectly-shaped round pupil on a patient’s eye. Another stage of eyeball tattoo development was initiated by Victor Morax, who instead of using a tattoo needle technique simply separated a thin layer of cornea and placed pigment beneath. All of the mentioned doctors contributed a lot into the development of modern techniques of eyeball tattooing.

In spite of its long history and proven medical applications, eyeball tattoo still causes many disputes and discussions in modern days. Most of them are caused by the fact that today eyeball tattoo often exceeds the limits of purely medical applications and migrates to the industry of body modification, where healthy people choose eyeball tattoo just to modify their appearance.

While the community of body modifiers gets thrilled with the new way to alter a human body, those, living in the state of Oklahoma are already deprived of such opportunity. In 2009 the Senate of Oklahoma wrote another page of modern history of eyeball tattoo by passing the bill, which made eyeball tattoo illegal in view of the dangers, associated with the procedure.

Anyway, eyeball tattoo, having a long history behind, is certainly one of the phenomena we are going to live with. Someone will surely deny and censure it, but there will always be people, choosing and supporting eyeball tattoo either for medical or some other reasons…