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[Syriel]

NOTE: Post is SFW, however both stories contains images and video of reconstructed breasts in a clinical setting. If you have an issue with medical procedures, you may not want to click the link at work unless you are viewing with images off.
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Saw this story via Google News this morning and thought it was worth posting. Vinnie Myers is a tattoo artist who has become renowned for his speciality, tattooing realistic looking nipples and areolas onto the reconstructed breasts of breast cancer survivors.

His tattoo practice (him and two others) does nothing else. They're so good at it that plastic surgeons refer their patients from all over the US, and all over the world. Myers has also become a secondary expert on breast reconstruction, only tattooing as the final step. If the plastic surgery isn't up to par, he gently explains the issue so that the patient can work with her doctor to get it corrected before coming back.

I've included quotes from both stories below, along with links to both stories. The first focuses on Myers, the second focuses on his two team members.

A year after her mastectomy and seven months after her last surgery to slip silicone implants into her reconstructed breasts, Jennifer Bohling disrobes down to her pants and stands up. She takes off the paper drape covering her bare torso and turns to face the man she has met just minutes earlier.

"How do they look?" she asks.

Vinnie Myers stares carefully at each of Bohling's breasts. He gently pinches the skin in some spots and taps other areas with a gloved finger before giving his initial assessment.

"They look good. They look really good," he says, calling the shape of her new breasts "fantastic." But not so good, he informs her, are the scars running horizontally through each one.

"The incision is exactly where I have to work, which isn't good. It's going to make it more tricky," he says.

The women arrive baring their breasts, along with a piece of their soul, and Myers, a former Army medic with a relaxed, wise-cracking bedside manner, has both the skillset and stories to put them at ease as he drills indelible ink into their skin.

Combining shadowing and highlight techniques, in the right variations of color, Myers creates the illusion of protrusions from flat surfaces.

"My mission is to make women look good in the mirror, naked. I want them to feel good when they're looking at themselves," he says. "So I tattoo the nipple and areola to look like a real nipple and areola, not like a brownish pink disc."

Myers first began tattooing three-dimensional nipples in 2001 after meeting a woman who worked for a Baltimore plastic surgeon unhappy with the results of his own efforts to ink. He started working with the doctor out of the surgeon's practice. Soon, other doctors reached out wanting him to work on their patients, too. Eventually, he started having doctors simply send patients to his shop.

"It got super busy, busier than I really wanted it to be," he recalls. Then, about five years ago, he felt he reached a tipping point.

"That's when I kind of decided I wasn't going to do it anymore. And the day that I decided to stop is the day my sister called me and told me she had breast cancer," he says.

"That was on a Monday. I decided, 'This is a sign that I've got to keep doing this."

Myers made a decision to devote his career entirely to nipple and areola tattooing.

"And from that point, it just went completely ballistic."

"I have to walk that fine line, because if you say one thing wrong, you can really crush someone's feelings," he says. Sometimes, a woman doesn't realize the poor work that has been done. Or, she is keenly aware and sensitive about it.

But keeping quiet could also mean failing to enlighten a client about possible surgical corrections she could get, Myers says.

He has only refused to tattoo about five or six women out of the roughly 8,000 cancer survivors who have come through his door, although he sometimes can talk women into postponing their tattoos until after they go back to their surgeons for additional work.

"The women who have done that, 100 percent of them have been thrilled with the final result because they actually had that concern in the back of their head," he says.

Heilizer knows her journey was "easy compared to most," but she still cried when her breast surgeon refused to consider a procedure that would have spared her nipples. She then got "just a really bad job" on her first set of nipple tattoos, from a brusque woman who failed to show up for their initial appointment. Her tattoos faded, ultimately leading her to Myers, whose opinions prompted her to seek additional plastic surgery this fall to fix something she was unhappy with.

"All women, no matter what their story, are impacted by this process," Heilizer said. "We all come to the tattooing part of our journey with a complicated backstory. The respect I felt by and trust for Vinnie helped me heal a part that had been damaged along the way."

"It's like comparing a Porsche to a Yugo. It's really that significantly different. I feel totally different. And it looks so much better," she says. "It's really amazing. It feels complete. Psychologically, it feels like everything is complete."

Scotchlas, the single mother from North Carolina, jokes she couldn't stop telling her friends about her tattoos after getting them.

"They're fabulous. I cannot stop looking in the mirror at myself. It's ridiculous," she says. "But it's such an incredible feeling to look in the mirror and you feel like you're whole and you're a woman again. It completely gave me my confidence back."

DellaCroce says that before his center's partnership with Myers, the surgeons found that the tattoos their staff applied faded quickly or into an odd shade.

"We end up being the sculptors in the studio, and he's a painter. And when you combine those two things together, it produces a result that is better the sum of its parts," he says. "And that's what we want to deliver to women as a long-term outcome, so that they don't feel injured anymore."

Source 1:
http://www.today.com/health/meet-ta...east-cancer-survivors-feel-whole-again-t48276

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On average, it takes about an hour to tattoo a pair of nipples if there aren't any complicating factors with a woman's breast reconstruction.

But on a recent Friday morning, Paul Bessette's appointment took twice as long, not because of the actual procedure, but because Bessette couldn't stop talking.

"She was particularly nervous. I'm pretty verbose," he says simply. "If you're really nervous, I'm going to talk you off the ledge, and then all of a sudden you're done. That tattoo is done and all you know is that I was chewing your ear off the whole time."

Many of the shop's clients are used to dealing with a medical system where there is a lead surgeon or specialist, and then several associates and assistants working under him.

"We're not like that. It's not Vinnie at the top — and then Paul and Trent," French says. "It's Vinnie, Paul and Trent. And that's it.There's not a tiered thing."

The more gregarious Besssette, 51, actually learned how to tattoo from Myers nearly two decades ago, leaving behind an office job as a graphic designer and illustrator.

Both he and Bessette began tattooing nipples about two years ago after sitting in for months with Myers on countless appointments, discussing color, skin tone, flap thickness, and how different scars should be approached. They also talked about layout and placement of the nipples, particularly when dealing with asymmetrical breasts.

Myers says that's why not anyone can be trained on how to tattoo a reconstructed breast, the least of whom the nurses or physician's assistants who usually perform them.

"If you just see a couple, that's not enough, because the first 10 you saw last week are nothing like the next 10 you'll see. You've got to commit months of sitting in and watching and doing this," he says. "You have to see this every day in order to really get comfortable. If you approach it like a regular tattoo, you can really mess things up."

Bessette says to outsiders, it may appear easy to do one type of tattooing multiple times a day, every day.

"But there's a completely different stress level. There's a lot more at stake here than in a lot of cases, psychologically and physically," he says. "All tattoos are pretty stressful because you're changing someone's life permanently, and it should be taken that seriously. In this case, there's something substantially more spiritual."

That kind of attitude is why Myers chose Bessette and Wyczawski. "I'd like to do this for the rest of my career," says Wyczawski, who loves the uniqueness of his craft.

Source 2:
http://www.today.com/health/magic-tattoos-how-vinnie-myers-his-team-heal-breast-cancer-t48421

 

[Robert Williams]

After Maori face tats these are the coolest.

 

[Syriel]

Yeah, I thought it was a pretty cool story. Not something that many people do, but something that positively impacts the lives of those who really need it.

He also gets to focus on his work, without having customers worry about the cost, since it is something that must be covered by insurance.