Experts say almost never.
A 24-year-old model from Canada is at risk of permanently losing her eyesight as a result of an eyeball tattoo procedure gone terribly wrong.
Catt Gallinger announced on her public Facebook page
that she elected to have a sclera tattoo (meaning the white part of the
eye is colored) on her right eye about four weeks ago. After the
procedure, purple liquid immediately began oozing from her eye.
Even
though she received medical attention (doctors prescribed her
antibiotic drops), her right eye became swollen shut. A physician then
gave her steroid drops, but the ink eventually settled around the cornea
of the eye. And now, after three hospital visits, she is faced with the
possibility of going blind in that eye. Gallinger claims in her post
that these complications are due to the artist using undiluted ink and
over-injecting the area.
“I am NOT
sharing this with you to cause trouble,” she wrote. “I am sharing this
to warn you to research who you get your procedures by as well as how
the procedure should be properly done."
This devastating story begs the question: Are sclera tattoos ever safe?
“I have never done it, I will never do it, and I would never consider it,” Mario Barth,
licensed tattoo artist and owner of the international tattoo enterprise
Starlight Tattoo, tells SELF. “If I ever see a tattoo artist who is
doing it, I will ask them if he or she is crazy.”
He explains that this particular story would be considered an extreme case of body modification.
“It
does not—in any form or way—represent what is happening in the tattoo
industry,” continues Barth, who boasts clients including Usher,
Sylvester Stallone, Lenny Kravitz, and Tommy Lee. “[Of] the other people
I know in this industry—and I know 10,000 of them—I’d say 99.9 percent
of them would disagree with any form of tattoo like this.… I think this
is going to be a case where tattoo people and non-tattoo people are
going to agree!”
In fact, Barth
doesn’t believe anyone in the tattoo industry has the qualifications to
perform this service. “I don’t think there is any training for this
anywhere in the world for a tattoo artist,” he says. “Maybe an eye
doctor could do it, but only because they know how to perform surgery.”
In rare circumstances, eye doctors may need to whiten the sclera.
Barth is correct, but it's not something doctors encounter very often. Brian Boxer Wachler,
M.D., a Beverly Hills–based ophthalmologist, tells SELF he has
performed this procedure a single time in a patient who had an
extenuating circumstance.
In this
case, Dr. Boxer Wachler used white ink to correct a surgical eye
coloring procedure that had gone wrong. Unlike getting tattooed by an
artist, patients getting tattooed by their eye surgeon are usually
prescribed steroid anti-inflammatory eye drops to reduce the serious
initial swelling and pain, he says.
But
the biggest concern with a tattoo artist inking someone’s eye—aside
from the fact that your artist is probably not moonlighting as an eye
surgeon—is that they can accidentally puncture the sclera and inject ink
inside the eye. For the procedure to be safe, Dr. Boxer Wachler
explains that the ink needs to be injected into the conjunctiva (the
outer membrane of the sclera) rather than inside the eyeball itself.
“There are reports of severe vision loss from this,” adds Dr. Boxer Wachler.
So,
just in case you were considering getting inked in your eye, know that
tattoo artists and eye doctors alike would strongly suggest against it.
