Mom of Five's Vacation Tattoo Becomes 'Scabbed, Crusted and Black' After Skin Infection Leaves Her Hospitalized

Kirsty Griffiths said doctors told her she might need her foot amputated if the infection didn’t clear up

A mom of five said she was hospitalized — and told she might need her leg amputated — after a tattoo gave her a severe cellulitis infection.

Liverpool, England, resident Kirsty Griffiths, 34, got a flower tattoo to cover up another design on her ankle while on vacation in Turkey last month.

As the tattoo artist finished his initial outline, "I started feeling dizzy and like I was going to pass out,” Griffiths told Kennedy News and Media, via The Daily Mail.

“I told him I didn't feel well and I got up … I couldn't see anything and I threw up,” she said.

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“I had never experienced this in my life before. To begin with the pain was okay but it started to get more painful…It was the kind of pain that made you feel sick. I couldn't bear it so I kept asking him to stop so I could breathe.”

She dismissed the pain as being standard for an ankle tattoo, but by the next morning, she says her ankle was “double the size of my other one.”

“It was red raw and looked like there were blisters on my tattoo.There was fluid behind it which was the infection.”

She flew home to England in “excruciating pain,” keeping her foot “elevated on the back of the chair as it was swelling. It was the worst four hours of my life,” said Griffiths, who went straight from the plane to Whiston Hospital in Prescot, Merseyside.

That’s where tests confirmed she had cellulitis. It’s “a common, potentially serious bacterial skin infection. The affected skin is swollen and inflamed and is typically painful and warm to the touch,” the Mayo Clinic explains.

“Two different surgeons came to visit me and one said if this doesn't clear up I might have to have my foot amputated,” she said. “I was crying and screaming every night in pain. It was morphine drip after morphine drip and I could still feel the pain through the painkillers.”

She spent four days in the hospital until ”luckily the antibiotics started working.”

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As for the tattoo, it's “scabbed, crusted and black. It's really itchy and still very painful," she said.

While Griffiths maintains it was caused by the tattoo artist putting the needle in too deep, the tattoo shop, which wasn’t named, told the outlet that all of their instruments are sterilized — and the infection was likely caused by Griffiths putting on socks after getting the tattoo.

As for any future ink, Griffiths says she's done: "It's put me off getting tattoos altogether."

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