A Model Let Her Boyfriend Tattoo Her Eye. It Didn't Go Well

He's now her ex-boyfriend, while she's hoping she gets her sight back
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Oct 1, 2017 4:14 PM CDT
A Model Let Her Boyfriend Tattoo Her Eye. It Didn't Go Well
Gallinger's eye leaks purple ink after botched procedure.   (Facebook)

Catt Gallinger isn't one to shy away from body alterations. The 24-year-old Canadian model is covered with tats and even has a split tongue, and she tells Vice that "body modifications are part of who I am." But Gallinger now concedes she may have unwittingly gone too far, trusting a boyfriend who wanted to tattoo her eyeball, which caused her left eye to leak purple ink, balloon up in size, and cause her "excruciating" pain, per the Washington Post. She also has lost vision in that eye, though she's hoping surgery will keep it from being permanent. Gallinger says her boyfriend kept pressuring her to let him perform what's called sclera staining—injecting colored ink into the white part of one's eye—and about a month ago, she finally gave in, as she'd known him for years and trusted that he knew what he was doing. But, as Vice outlines, it appears he did it all wrong, save for numbing her eye first.

Experts note if you're going to attempt such a process (some say you shouldn't at all), the safest way to do so is over several days, with a small needle and a tiny amount of ink mixed with an ample amount of saline solution. Gallinger says her ex used a large needle, did the procedure in about 10 minutes, and injected pure ink into her eye. Her eye immediately swelled up, but he told her it was normal; the hospital she went to, not familiar with this type of procedure, simply told her to ice her eye and take steroid drops and pain meds. Gallinger has since taken to social media to warn others against having this procedure done, saying she's hoping to have surgery to get the excess ink out of her eye sometime this week. "My mental health is holding pretty strong today, so I'm going to keep fighting," she writes. Her boyfriend, meanwhile, broke up with her out of the blue shortly after the botched tattoo. (More tattoos stories.)

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