Kilmarnock medical tattoo artist hits out at Facebook nudity regulations

A Kilmarnock artist is supporting a protest at Facebook's headquarters in London today after photos of her breast tattoos for mastectomy patients were blocked by the site.

Angela Patterson is part of the group 'World Medical Artists' who create realistic nipples and areolas for breast cancer survivors who have had to undergo a mastectomy.

A mastectomy is an operation to remove the breast typically in a bid to treat breast cancer.

Angela creates tattoos, at no profit to herself, in the hope of boosting post op patients' confidence, mental health and to give them back a sense of femininity that can often feel lost after surgery.

She believes that by Facebook censoring her work due to nudity and pornography regulations, many woman will not be aware of the services out there that may help them, and that Facebook now need to take a more human approach and realise the images are not sexual.

She said: "Their feelings after the treatment is that they feel complete, they feel feminine and they feel so much more confident.

"Their treatment is obviously complete so they've gone through chemotherapy, they've had their breast remove and they've had an extremely traumatic journey.

"Every female has breasts at the end of the day, but we're not posting pictures of breasts.

"We're posting pictures of post mastectomy patients that have gone through an ordeal and we want to be able to reach out to them and show them what is available for them.

"It's about boosting their confidence and we anchor in a lot of different feelings and when they do see their new nipples, it's just such an amazing look on their face.

"From a mental health point of view it's a real boost to their confidence."

The protest is set to start at 11 am, with patients, artists and survivors all campaigning for less restrictions on the industry.

In response a spokesperson for Facebook said: "Images showing post-mastectomy scarring and areola tattoos are absolutely allowed on Facebook and Instagram.

"We applaud the incredible work medical tattooists do for breast cancer survivors, and know our apps play an important role in helping these communities connect.

"By design, these tattoos often look extremely realistic, which means our technology – and even our content reviewers – don’t always spot the difference, so we do encourage people to make it clear when they’re posting an image that’s a tattoo.

"We understand how frustrating this can be. We’ve been working closely with World Medical Artists and are grateful for their input and experience as we continue to explore new ways to avoid this content being mistakenly removed."

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