Tattooist Gives Man In Sevilla A New Eye After 50 Years

A man who lost his right eye in an accident over 50 years ago has been given a new one by a tattooist in Sevilla.

At the age of 25, Florencio lost his eye after being kicked by a horse in the stable where he worked. Finally, at the age of 80 he decided to have an eye tattooed on his eyelid, writes Nuis Diario, Wednesday, July 19.

Accident Over 50 Years Ago

Florencio was only 25 years old and worked in a stable in a village in Sevilla when he was so badly hit in the face by a horse that he ended up losing an eye.

He has had three operations to fit a prosthesis, but all three times his body has rejected it and has ended up expelling it. For more than fifty years Florencio has hidden behind a pair of sunglasses that he never takes off.

One Of Spain’s Leading Repair Tattooists

The solution occurred to him when a friend from Sanlucar la Mayor gave him the idea to paint on the eye he didn’t have, after finding Manu Madrigal from Sevilla, one of the country’s leading experts in repair tattoos.

Florencio asked him to tattoo the image of the eye he had lost on his eyelid, so that with sunglasses it would like he had his own two eyes.

Tattooist, Manu recalls when he was asked: ‘The first thing I said to him was no.’ However, the challenge was too big to refuse and he ended up accepting.

The consultation alone took nine months, the tattoo artist met with Florencio and his surgeon to analyse the risks and weigh up the pros and cons of such a complex tattoo. He had never worked on such delicate skin, the thinnest in the whole body measuring between 0.6 and 1 millimetre thick.

A Most Difficult Process

One of the problems they had to overcome was with the eye socket being empty, the skin was not stretched and so it was impossible to draw on it. The surgeon found a solution by sewing up the eyelid to tighten it and make the tattooist’s work easier.

At the Twotattoo studio, Manu was accompanied by Florencio’s surgeon at all times. During a first three-hour session, Manuel outlined every detail of the eye. Painting the eyelashes upwards, the age-worn tear trough, the eternal youth of his pupil and even a reflection of light sneaking into the iris.

Two weeks later, after it had healed sufficiently, a second two-hour session was used to review his work. Manu, ever the perfectionist, searched through a countless colour combinations to find the same shade of blue in his other eye. ‘It’s impossible for them to be the same,’ says Manu, ‘one eye has life… and the other doesn’t.’ But together they have given him back a look that Florencio had not seen for more than fifty years.