I tattooed my eyeballs purple and blue—now I’m going blind
A mom of five brushed off her daughter’s advice to not get her eyeballs tattooed due to potential blindness — and now, she’s losing her vision.
Anaya Peterson, a law student, was in awe of Australian model Amber Luke, who tattooed her eyeballs a vivid blue and went blind for three weeks after. Despite Luke getting her vision back, it seems that 32-year-old Peterson might lose her sight for good.
“I was just going to get one [eye tattoo] at first, because I thought that if I go blind, at least I’ve got the other eye. I should have stuck with that,” Peterson told Kennedy News. “My daughter told me that I didn’t want to do that [the tattoo] asking, ‘What if you go blind?’ She wasn’t on board with it at all.”
Now she wishes she had listened to her wise 7-year-old. The Belfast, Northern Ireland-based woman was left hospitalized by the eyeball modification after a potential reaction to the ink, and now claims she is at risk for developing cataracts.
“I don’t have 20/20 vision anymore. From a distance, I can’t see features on faces,” she said. “If I didn’t have my eyeballs tattooed, I wouldn’t be having this problem. Even today I woke up with more floaters in my eyes. And that is dangerous.”
She’s “always going to have this problem,” since she can’t remove tattoo ink in her eyes.
But her harrowing tattoo tale didn’t have such a rocky beginning — for months after tattooing her right-eye blue in July 2020, she had no complications. Despite suffering from some dryness and headaches, she opted to tattoo her left eyeball purple in December of that year.
In August 2021, things took a turn for the worst. She woke up one day with incredibly swollen eyelids that looked like she had gone “five rounds with Mike Tyson.” As the symptoms worsened, she decided to check herself into the hospital, where doctors gave her intravenous medication for three days and biopsied her problematic eye.
“I just wanted to be at home watching [TV] to be honest. I can’t even put it into words. It wasn’t nice at all whatsoever,” she recalled. “It was traumatizing to go through. I just remember thinking, ‘I’m not doing that s – – t again, with the eye tattoo. I’m definitely not doing that s – – t again.’ “
The body modification enthusiast left the hospital “on the mend,” but regrets her decision to tattoo the whites of her eyes in the first place.
“I’m kind of recovered — on the outside, it’s recovered. It’s just inside. I’m basically on the verge of going blind,” she said. “If I could go back in time, I would have done one black [eye tattoo] and left it. I would have done one black. Absolutely.”
Despite the grim outlook, Peterson remains positive in the face of negative comments she receives online.
“I tell my daughter not to care about the opinions of someone else because they’re just ordinary people like you,” she said. “You have positive comments and negative comments, but the negative comments always overshadow the positive ones.”
According to Peterson’s inspiration, Aussie influencer Luke, an eyeball tattoo should never result in blindness if done correctly.
“Unfortunately, my artist went too deep into my eyeball,” she previously told the Daily Star when she lost her vision for three weeks. “If your eyeball procedure’s done correctly, you’re not supposed to go blind at all.”
