“I dare to look at myself in the mirror again. I have the impression that my breast has been given back to me, ”enthuses Stéphanie, a resident of the Toulouse region. Suffering from early breast cancer in 2009 at the age of 47, she had to undergo a complete removal of one of her breasts. At that time, the surgeon fitted her with a breast prosthesis and an authorized nurse tattooed her areola. “They did the best they could but I didn’t accept this ‘breast’ at all.” In 2019, the mother of the family must remove the prosthesis urgently. “At that time, they reconstructed it by grafting an abdominal flap. The surgeon then advised me to go through a specialized tattoo artist to take care of my nipple”. And this is where the magic happens.
Thanks to a trompe-l’oeil reconstruction of her areola down to the last detail, Stéphanie can turn the page on her cancer. “For me, it’s finally behind me. I feel like a normal person. I found my breast, ”explains the one that passed into the hands of Muriel Verstraete, a tattoo artist member of the Institut du Sein Grand Toulouse. The latter, based in the Toulouse region since 2018, works on the repair of the breast, but also of any other scar or burn.
Ten hours of work
“It’s about applying the techniques of traditional artistic tattooing to restore the body. Create an optical illusion by playing with dedicated inks and games of shadow and light to bring a breast back to life, hide a scar, a burn or vitiligo,” explains the meticulous professional in her salon. Muriel’s Tattoos.
“I will never give them back what was taken from them, but I do my best to help them,” she testifies. And the maximum is these hours of work to recreate as naturally as possible a part of a body bruised by life. “It takes me between 8 and 10 hours of work to design a nipple, for example, because I do tone on tone. I try to find the most similar colors and the most natural shape to create the illusion. »
A new identity to integrate
A work of goldsmith which can be beneficial according to Anaïs Bergeron, clinical psychologist, specialized in the care of patients with somatic diseases. “Human beings abhor a vacuum and everyone will find their own strategy to rebuild themselves,” says the psychologist from the Ambroise Paré clinic in Toulouse. “After an illness or an accident, you have to come to terms with what is no longer there. The restorative tattoo can be a solution. But it’s unique to everyone. It has to be the patient’s choice to integrate this tattoo into their new self,” she adds. “But if we are on this journey, it is because we have done the work of mourning for our old body and we are trying to find a new identity”, concludes Anaïs Bergeron.
And all this has a cost, already psychological, but also financial: “It is unfortunately not reimbursed by Social Security and not everyone can afford it… I do not understand why it is not reimbursed, knowing that the tattoo is part of the physical reconstruction after the illness”, deplores Stéphanie, who had to pay 900 euros to find a body in which she feels good.
Far from erasing its history, the restorative tattoo helps to cover the marks of suffering. A physical work that must be accompanied by a psychological journey to really turn the page on the disease.