First there was eyeball tattoos and now ink for your teeth! Steve Heward, a US dental technician and founder of Heward Dental Lab (based in Utah, US), has taken the dental market by storm as one of the world’s first tooth tattooists.
Heward’s company has been established for 20 years and his team are trained to be artists first then how to construct crowns afterwards. Steve says - ‘I’ve been tattooing teeth since the early 1980s and depending on the complexity, it can take from five minutes to and hour or more. But I usually spend a half hour.’
He says US dentists ‘love them and are amazed’. Prices for the permanent tiny tooth etchings range from $75.00 up to $200.00 for more complicated designs which include anything from Mickey Mouse, Elvis and Abraham Lincoln to eagles, bowling balls and spiders.
And do clients go to the extreme of having teeth removed before purchasing a piece of his artistry?
‘I hope they wait until they need a crown, but I bet some people have them done just because they want a piece of artwork on their tooth,’ he says.