by CARA ANTHONY
Following an injury or surgery, patients are often left with scars or skin discoloration. Tattoo artists want to help.
The first fingernail tattoo started off as a joke by a man who lost the tips of two fingers in a construction accident in 2018.
But that shifted after Eric Catalano, an auto finance manager turned tattoo artist, finished with his needle.
“The mood changed in here,” Catalano recalled as he stood in his Eternal Ink Tattoo Studio. “Everything turned from funny to wow.”
When Catalano posted a photo of the inked fingernails online last January, he thought maybe 300 people would like the realistic tattoo. He had no idea the image would be viewed by millions of people around the world. Even “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” tracked him down to feature the viral tattoo: a pair of fingernails that looked so real no one could believe their eyes.
The viral photo pushed Catalano, 39, further into the world of paramedical tattooing. Now people with life-altering scars come from as far as Ireland to visit Catalano’s tattoo shop in this rural village about 30 miles outside St. Louis. They enter Eternal Ink looking for the healing touch they saw online. With flesh-toned ink and a needle, Catalano makes his clients feel whole again with an art form and industry that picks up where doctors leave off.
Catalano is known for his talent with intricate fingernails and filling in the blanks left empty by accidents or surgeries, but other paramedical tattoo artists also are trying out flesh-toned pigments to camouflage imperfections, scars, and discolorations for all skin colors.
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