A surgeon in the Netherlands has developed a technique for implanting decorative jewelry inside your eyeball. As MSNBC explains it:

The procedure involves inserting a 0.13 inch wide piece of specially developed jewelry — the range includes a glittering half-moon or heart — into the eye’s mucous membrane under local anaesthetic at a cost of $610 to $1,232.

“In my view it is a little more subtle than (body) piercing. It is a bit of a fun thing and a very personal thing for people,” said Gerrit Melles, director of the Netherlands Institute for Innovative Ocular Surgery.

Okay, the modern primitive movement is officially over. Clearly, Middle America has so openly embraced the supposedly-alternative world of body art that even the fucking Dutch are cutting themselves open in an attempt to stay ahead of the hipster curve.

This reminds me of an idea I thought of a while ago: Internal Tattoos. The pitch would go like this:

Dude! Want to stick it to the man with some consumption-as-rebellion — but afraid that tattooing is getting too mainstream? We’re with you, brother! Now that every Jenni and Robyn at the local sorority has a butterfly smeared on her ankle, that ink you had done back in ‘94 — you know, the Chinese pictogram for “resist” on the back of your neck — just doesn’t have the same subcultural frisson. It really sucks.

But hey! We’re here to drag you one step ahead of the pack again — because we’re offering internal tattoos. That’s right: Tattoos inside your body. We’ll open you up surgically, tattoo your desired pattern on any one of 17 major organs, then sew you back up again. Nobody will be able to see your tats — but that’s the point! Read the memo, man: Visible-skin tattoos are over. But you don’t care. No you do not! You’re surfing the edge again! With a super-ironic LIVE FREE OR DIE etched onto the surface of your pancreas, you’ll be sporting a tattoo so extreme we’ve dropped the capital X. Call now. Operators are standing by.

Holy shit am I ever a crank.

(Thanks to Rummaging for this one!)