I was asked yesterday to show people my eyeball tattoo, so after warning them it was somewhat grotesque (it’s a totally 3D bump) I showed it off… I made this animation yesterday wondering about what if it wasn’t a cyst of tattoo ink, but some sort of botfly — Aliens — creature was gestating its larvae inside my body… I was going to link to the articles on my eyeball tattoo, but it seems that they’ve been deleted from ModBlog along with all my articles. Oh well.
This is all hand drawn by the way and about 300 frames.
Nefarious wrote her first “book” today, based on Frog and Toad. It goes like this:
Translation:
1. “frog and tod / bi ari”
(Frog and Toad / By Ari)
2. “frog and tod gow to the prc”
(Frog and Toad go to the park.)
3. “tod goz to the prc and plaz”
(Toad goes to the park and plays.)
4. “frog wz wochin tod”
(Frog was watching Toad.)
We took the pages she made and I reprinted them at 1/4 size and bound them into a little book, which she then read to her dolls (cutest scene ever). The calendar by the way is a daily x-off until Halloween.
I did a little work on my Uilenspiegel painting as well. This is the base colour. It’ll be touched up of course, but the big change is that it’ll all be lined in the final stage which is what really brings it out. I have high hopes for this particular painting and think it’s going quite well so far.
We’re all prepped for tomorrow’s zombie walk (watch out)… click the flier below to visit the official site. Caitlin (who will be the primary makeup artist) I think is going as a walking autopsied corpse, Nefarious is a princess party zombie with an extra eyeball, and I’m going with gouged out eyes and a wide stitched up wound. I’ll post photos tomorrow evening.
I made a new video of my eye… I don’t have any editing software on this computer (I’m still using Caitlin‘s) so I just posted it as it came off the camera…
My eyeball tattoo (done by Howie/LunaCobra) remains one of my favorite body modifications, along with the magnetic implant (by Steve Haworth) and my split tongue and others. Admittedly it just looks like a growth/deformity and some strange spots, but I just love it… It’s approaching one year old, making it, along with Josh’s blue eye, the oldest injection-style eye tattoo out there, and the oldest one with a complication. The “cyst” type structure still has a bit of a dull ache from time to time, although I admit that it might just be a matter of feeling paranoid about a headache! It’s certainly not enough to stop me from wanting to add more.
It’s crazy how popular this has gotten… As well as being featured on CSI, I think Howie and a couple others have done around two dozen by now. When I was still with BME, only a small percentage of the people I knew chose to submit their pictures, so I suspect there could be even more people than I’m guessing. For example, here’s Stevve, one of Howie’s other victims customers:
They’re doing a “demon eye” on him; this is the first stage of the work. Next they’re going to be doing a layer of black ink which should blend nicely. You can see some great pictures of Josh’s eyeball (a mix of blues), as well as other eyeball tattoos in my previous ModBlog posts. Definitely I’m very jealous every time I see one, and I hope Howie comes up to Toronto this summer again.
Eyeball tattooing update — I had a nice time getting my eye ultrasounded this afternoon, although it took me a ton of elevator rides to find the eye clinic because I had the wrong address and Princess Margaret Hospital has three separate towers to explore.
Anyway, it looks like what happened is that when I rubbed my eye too hard about a week ago (I knew at the time I'd damaged it), I broke a bunch of blood vessels in the tissue (which was weakened by the tattooing) above where the muscle injects on the outer edge of my eye and a hematoma has formed over the muscle, which is also slightly inflamed. This should break down over the next few weeks without issue, although I have another appointment in a week to have it checked out.
The doctors were nice and gave me a printout of one of the ultrasound shots. Assuming I'm remembering what I was explained to me correctly, there's a legend underneath this shot.
A. The conjuntiva (the outside of the eye) B. The hematoma (the swollen part) C. Muscle (slightly inflamed) D. The sclera (the main shell of the eye) E. Some peeling of retinal tissue (likely unrelated) F. The interior of the eye.
Note: I may have C and D shifted up slightly; this wasn't the clearest of the shots so I'm not totally sure, but it's the one that was on the screen at the end so it was the one I was about to get a printout of…
So even though I've had a doctor check my eye repeatedly and they tell me that it looks fine (not that they think it looks good or anything, but at least my vision is perfect), I really think there's about a 35% chance that there's a serious problem about to “erupt”. The redness and general soreness from it is definitely gone, but there is sort of a throbbing feeling, and because I'm in so much constant pain anyway that it's so hard to gauge it in terms of “rate the pain from 1 to 10″.
Here's a kind of gross picture:
I'm going to go have it looked at again on Monday (even though they said “come back in two weeks”), because to me it seems like the third injection (the one that went deep) is trying to reject or is otherwise becoming increasingly irritated and I expect the surface of the eye to split open (assuming it's not just slowly leaking out, which I don't think is happening any more than already has)… The doctors think it's an inflamed muscle and I'd like to believe that (because it has sensation, I think that objectively they're probably right), but haha, I guess we'll see what horrorshow thing happens. Arr!
I want to state again for the record that if something goes wrong I don't have any malice or regrets about it, and to be honest, I'm surprisingly not particularly stressed out over it. Damaged vision in one eye? It's the least of my problems, really!
