A blind man with tattooed black eyeballs says he is constantly accused of making himself sightless – despite losing his vision years before undergoing the extreme body modification.
Juliusz, who goes by InkedJuliusz online, says strangers regularly hurl abuse at him because of his heavily tattooed appearance and white cane, with some wrongly claiming his eye tattoos caused his blindness.
The 27-year-old, who also has a split tongue, head implants and extensive tattoos, says he was left blind by a rare genetic condition that caused tumours to grow along his optic nerves.
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Now he is speaking out to set the record straight and challenge the myths that follow him wherever he goes.
“The cruellest false claim of all is the recurring accusation that my eye tattoos caused my blindness,” Juliusz, from Kreis Mettmann, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, told Need To Know.
“This is medically impossible, and it is deeply distressing to hear it repeated.
“My blindness was caused by optic atrophy from optic gliomas in NF1, documented by multiple eye specialists, including at the University Hospital Düsseldorf, with medical certificates from October 2025 and January 2026 confirming the cause.
“The tattoos were performed years after I had already gone blind.
“The timeline alone makes it impossible.
“The medicine makes it impossible and yet the myth persists, and it wounds.”
Juliusz lives with Neurofibromatosis Type 1 (NF1), an incurable genetic disorder that led to tumours developing along the nerves connecting his eyes to his brain.
He first experienced vision problems as a child.
His left eye was almost completely blind from an early age, while sight in his right eye deteriorated slowly over many years before doctors confirmed he had also lost vision in that eye in 2022.
Today, he says he can only perceive light and shadow and relies on a white cane to navigate independently.
Under German law, he is officially recognised as blind.
But rather than receiving sympathy, Juliusz says he often faces hostility because of the way he looks.
He said: “The decline began in childhood. There were vision problems noticeable from a very young age.
“My left eye was essentially blind from early childhood.
“My right eye then deteriorated gradually over many years.
“It was slow, creeping, progressive, never sudden, which is part of why it is so hard for outsiders to understand.
“I face hostility in public on a regular basis, dehumanising verbal attacks because of my appearance combined with my visible disability.
“I have been called things like devil or the devil’s work, which stings all the more given that I was raised strictly Catholic.
“As a blind person, I already feel particularly vulnerable, and on buses and trains I often feel genuinely unsafe, with a real fear of being attacked, both because of how I look and because of my disability.
“Some people seem provoked or made uncomfortable by the combination of a visible disability and an extreme appearance.
“The prejudice and the false narratives are what hurt most.
“People accuse me of faking my blindness, to my face, while I’m standing there with a white cane, unable to see their features or read their expression.
“That is profoundly invalidating.
“Strangers say things like ‘You’re just pretending, you’re not really blind,’ or ’You can see perfectly fine, drop the act’.
“It’s deeply shaming, especially when the truth is that I genuinely only perceive light and shadow.
“Let me make this as plain as I can: nobody walks around with a white cane for fun, or as a decoration.
“I am not pretending. I am blind.”
Juliusz says his dramatic body modifications were his way of taking back control after years of illness.
He said: “The disease had taken the function of my eyes from me.
“So I took the organ itself and made it entirely my own, on my own terms.
“The way I think of it is simple, if my eyes could no longer show me the world, then they would at least belong completely to me.”
Alongside blindness, he also lives with chronic pain caused by thousands of benign tumours that develop across his body because of NF1.
He said: “It feels sh*tty.
“I miss seeing things, sometimes very much.
“I miss being able to look at a festival stage and take in the whole atmosphere, all that energy, with my own eyes.
“Shopping independently no longer really works.
“Public transport is very challenging.”
Despite the abuse he faces, Juliusz hopes sharing his story will help challenge misconceptions about disability and body modification.
He added: “I share it because I want to be truly seen as a person living with an incurable genetic disease that took my sight by destroying my optic nerves.
“I want to be seen as someone who expresses himself artistically through extreme body modification on his own body and as a human being arguing for medical accuracy, for proper disability recognition, for accessibility.
“I want for an end to harmful prejudice and false narratives, whether they come from an authority, from a stranger on a tram, or from anywhere else.”
