Today in weird patienta series of cases of serious complications following eye tattoos.
The tattoo of the sclera, the white part of our eyes, is a much more delicate body modification than a tattoo of the skin. Still poorly understood, the serious and impressive complications linked to this practice are increasingly numerous in the medical literature.
Impressive and serious complications
At 26, a Mexican comes to the hospital for eye pain and loss of vision, four days following having his sclera tattooed with ink. He tells eye doctors that he was injected with a mixture of green pigment, isopropyl alcohol, distilled water and glycerin. This chemical cocktail transformed the tissues of the patient’s eye into a green “gelatin”. He was prescribed a course of antibiotics and corticosteroids to prevent secondary bacterial infection and relieve his irritated eye. After 15 days of treatment, he regains a healthier appearance but the sclera is still green, the patient has also regained part of his visual acuity.
This impressive case is not isolated. In 2017, a young woman rushed to the emergency room crying purple tears because of a sclera tattoo gone bad. The same year, 24-year-old patient required surgery due to black tattoo ink injection into the vitreous humor, the thick liquid inside the eyeball. The ink, contaminated with bacteria, has done damage to the deepest part of the eye. After several surgeries and antibiotic treatment, the young man’s eye was saved, at the cost of seriously degraded sight.
Tattoos, a risky practice for the eyes
Tattoos can also weaken the eyes even if they are not made directly on the eyeball. Ophthalmologists at Johns-Hopkins Medical University in Baltimore, USA, treated two patients with uveitis, inflammation of the uvea, concomitant with inflammation of the skin located near a tattoo. Doctors assume that the tattoo caused both skin and eye inflammation.
Eyeball tattoos are not techniques developed by doctors, their success depends on the dexterity of the tattoo artist. Indeed, to color the sclera without risk, the ink must be injected just under the surface of the conjunctiva, the transparent membrane which surrounds the eye. If the needle is misplaced, the ink can end up deeper in the eye and cause all sorts of complications, some as serious as the outright loss of an eye.
