Scleral tattooing
eye tattooing
Scleral tattooing is the practice of tattooing the sclera, or white part, of the human eye. Rather than being injected into the tissue, the dye is injected between two layers of the eye, then gradually spreads. The process remains uncommon due to professionals' discomfort performing the procedure and is illegal in the American states Oklahoma and Indiana and the Canadian provinces Ontario and Saskatchewan.
History and practice
There are occasional reports dating back to the 1940s which suggest tattooing the scelera with small dots as part of experimental protocols seeking to determine how the human eye moves. There is, however, no documented history of scelera tattooing for medical or cosmetic purposes prior to the early 21st century. In around 2003, writer and artist Shannon Larratt photoshopped his eyes in a photo to look like the blue eyes of the Fremen in Frank Herbert's novel Dune. Inspired by his then-wife's eye implant surgery, he reached out to Howie "Luna Cobra" Rollins to devise a method to color his eyes permanently blue. Cobra agreed to attempt the procedure if Larratt could find two other volunteers. Larratt succeeded and carried out the process in 2007. As of March 2013, both Larratt and his volunteer Joshua Matthew Rahn have died of causes unrelated to the procedure (tubular aggregate myopathy and murder, respectively {{cn}}).
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This entry incorporates text from “Scleral tattooing” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.