An Australian woman with 200 tattoos said she went blind for three weeks after having her eyeballs inked.
Amber Luke, 24, who refers to herself as Blue Eyes White Dragon, said the procedure was extremely painful.
“I can’t even begin to describe to you what the feeling was like. The best thing I can give you is once the eyeball was penetrated with the ink, it felt like [the tattoo artist] grabbed ten shards of glass and rubbed it in my eye,” she recalled.
Luke said the artist shoved the needle too deep into her sclera, the white outer layer of the eyeball, causing her to go blind.
“That was pretty brutal,” she said.
However, the young woman has no regrets about her decision to have her eyes colored or any of the other tattoos that cover her body.
Luke began to modify herself when she was 16 and has since spent more than $37,000 on procedures that include breast augmentation, lip fillers, and having her earlobes stretched and her tongue split. She also got ear implants to make them look pointed and had silver fang grills made for her teeth.
Although she hopes to have her entire body tattooed by March 2020, Luke said, “I don’t plan on getting any more body modifications that are extreme in that manner. So no more tongue splitting, no more eyeball tattooing.”
However, her mother, Vikki, said she became emotional when her daughter told her she had inked her eyes blue.
She commented:
“Why would you do that to yourself, knowing that there is a danger to it? As we know as the parents, some kids will just do what they want to do, regardless of what we say. But I brought her into the world with the best skills that I could give, the best that I could give her; it’s just for me to be there and go along the journey with her. And prop her up, and love her. She never saw herself as being beautiful. She didn’t see herself through my eyes. But I’ve supported her because I could actually see the transition, the growth and how it’s made her come to who she is today.”
Doctors diagnosed Luke with severe clinical depression when she was 15. She called the experience of getting her first tattoo a “negative energy release.”
“Everyone has their own opinion. Everyone knows what beauty is in their own eyes,” she said, adding that she hopes for “a bit more open-mindedness when it comes to body modification … in the community and within the workplace.”
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