Tats for Ur Eyes

I was watching National Geographic's Taboo one day and found out about this new technique in tattooing where an artist can tattoo the whites of your eyes any color you want. Currently their are only about four people who have successfully gone through this procedure and even fewer tattoo artists that can actually do it. While it sound kind of cool and little freaky (hell, it looks pretty freaky too), it is extremely dangerous. There are bunch of different risk involved the most being permanent damage to the cornea and lost of sight, though this hasn't stop people from trying it out. While eyeball tattooing has been done since the 19th century, maybe even earlier than that, to correct defects in a blind eye. Usually done only for medical reasons like scaring resulting from eye trauma by doctors.

However, pretty recently, people have begun to do it as part of body modification. It while their are virtually no doctor that is willing to do it, so a few tattoo artists have begun to study and experiment with different techniques on how to apply permanent color to the whites of the eyes. The artist that did the show said that he experimented on pigs' eyes since their eyes are pretty similar to our own to figure out how exactly to apply ink without it running (just thinking about it makes my eyes water).

A regular needle with ink at the end doesn't cut it for this tat, the artist has to literally inject the ink with a syringe needle into the whites of the eye at different points to get it to spread throughout the eye. And one slight twitch from the one getting the tattoo can cause a permanent loss of sight.

The first inked eye was done last year by three people Paul Unstoppable from Canada (oh Canada), Josh and Shannon Larratt to see if it could actually be done. They inked their entire eyes blue. They really stress that they and the artist had research the procedure extensively before attempting it. It took about 40 injections to get the entire eye blue. First up was Paul who was done with a traditional hand poking technique which wasn't all that effective so on Josh, the switched to a syringe and thinned out the ink with a antibiotic eyewash which was a lot more successful. While Josh and Paul's tats were pretty successful, Shannon has wrote that he did suffer from a minor damage that healed well.

Since these three, there has only been one other attempt at eyeball tattooing by Quille De Sade(at left: taken from national geographic site) is a chef from England who appeared on Taboo. He did his completely black which made him look like Morpheus from Sandman.

Just thinking about this makes my eyes itch.