The eyeball tattoo is the latest fashion among tattoo lovers, although the practice is much discussed. Tattooists use a very fine needle to inject a pigment diluted with a small amount of antibiotic eye drops directly into the sclera (white part of the eye) so that it is distributed under the thin upper layer of the eye or conjunctiva. A single injection covers about a quarter of the eye, so several injections are needed to tattoo the entire sclera. The end result is an eyeball colored in blue, green, red and black for life.
The first to experiment with the technique was the American tattoo artist Luna Cobra, who claims to have been inspired by the completely blue-eyed characters of the science-fiction film Dune, directed by David Lynch in 1984.
According to the tattoo artists, the execution of the tattoo eyeball is painless and should not be harmful. However, for ophthalmologists the practice of tattooing the inside of the eye is very dangerous and can cause infection, inflammation and blindness . The pigment, in fact, is inoculated with a series of injections just below the upper layer of the eye, an area that has a thickness of about a millimeter. The needle, therefore, can accidentally puncture sensitive parts, risking to cause permanent damage to the eye . Not surprisingly, several US states are considering banning scleral tattooing.
