The mum-of-five said she was hospitalized – and told her leg may need to be amputated – after developing a severe cellulitis infection from the tattoo.
Liverpool, England resident Kirsty Griffiths, 34, got a flower tattoo to cover up another design on her ankle while on holiday in Turkey last month.
When the tattoo artist finished his initial design, “I started feeling dizzy and like I was going to pass out,” Griffiths told Kennedy News and Media, via The Daily Mail.
“I told him I didn’t feel well and I got up… I didn’t see anything and I threw up,” she said.
Kirsty Griffiths.
Kennedy News and Media
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“I have never experienced this before in my life. At first the pain was fine, but it started to get more and more painful… It was the kind of pain that makes you feel sick. I couldn’t take it so I kept begging him to stop so I could breathe.”
She dismissed the pain as standard for an ankle tattoo, but by the next morning, she says her ankle was “twice the size of my other one.”
“It was raw and looked like there were blisters on my tattoo. There was fluid behind it which was an infection.”
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Kirsty Griffiths scab tattoo over ankle.
Kennedy News and Media
She flew home to England in “excruciating pain”, with her foot “raised up on the back of the chair because it was swelling. It was the worst four hours of my life,” said Griffiths, who went straight from the plane to Whiston Hospital in Prescot, Merseyside .
There, tests confirmed that he had cellulitis. It is “a common, potentially serious bacterial skin infection. The affected skin is swollen and inflamed and is usually painful and warm to the touch,” the Mayo Clinic explains.
“I had two different surgeons come to see me and one said I might have to have my foot amputated if this didn’t clear up,” she said. “Every night I cried and screamed in pain. It was morphine drip after morphine drip and I was still in pain through the painkillers.”
She spent four days in the hospital until “fortunately the antibiotics started working”.
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Image of a tattoo gun.
Getty
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As for the tattoo, it is “scabed, shriveled and black. It’s really itchy and still hurts a lot,” she said.
While Griffiths claims it was caused by a tattoo artist who stuck the needle in too deep, the tattoo shop, which has not been named, told the establishment that all their instruments are sterilized – and the infection was likely caused by Griffiths’ wearing socks after the tattoo.
As for future ink, Griffiths says she’s done: “It’s put me off tattooing completely.”
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Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education