Pictures are Mark Bertram’s fingernails tattooed by Eric Catalano.

Last March, Mark Bertram of Waterloo tripped and fell into a fan belt on an air conditioning unit at work. 

In the accident, he lost the tips of his left index and middle fingers. 

The sight of his shortened fingers did not bother Bertram, but he decided to get something done about their appearance because he thought it would be funny. 

“It all started as a joke with me and my wife,” Bertram remembered. “I just thought ‘well, I’ll get some fingernail tattoos and show people I’m not sensitive about the way I looked.’”

So last Tuesday, Bertram went to Eric Catalano, a tattoo artist who owns Eternal Ink Tattoo Studio in Hecker. The results were better than anticipated.  

“When he did the tattoos and they came out the way they looked, I’m like ‘man, that is nice,’” Bertram recalled.

Catalano said this was his first time doing a fingernail tattoo, though he has been practicing on this type of tattoo for years. 

“I just started looking at pictures and trying to use my training to mimic 3-D hyperrealism,” he said. “There’s nowhere to train for that.”

Catalano’s experience comes with a project he has been working on for the past few years: performing nipple and areola reconstruction for breast cancer survivors…>>> 

Read more in the January 23, 2019, issue.

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