Maria Gina Altobelli knows how to turn heads in her direction. Besides owning and operating her Gipsy.g Tattoo and Piercing shop in Fondi, Italy, she also operates a vibrant TikTok account where she routinely shares clips of herself tattooing her many clients. However, it was one tattoo in particular that has turned Altobelli into an international social media sensation for the time being.

On TikTok, Maria Gina Altobelli posted a video in which she appears to tattoo a pair of glasses onto her client’s face. The ink that she used for the video was black. Although she claims that the man got the pair of glasses as a real tattoo, many social media users are less than convinced and believe that she probably just used a Sharpie marker to make the glasses shape.

However, the 30-year-old tattoo artist claimed that her inking job was as real as could be and worked as a way to remind people to put on their glasses for those who “always lose your glasses.” The tattooist also shared her process of inking the client with the glasses, saying that she used a needle on the man’s eyebrow and eye area to carefully craft the ink job.

When the viral video came to an end, the client approached a mirror and then put on a pair of real glasses. He appears to look pleased with the inkwork that Altobelli did on his face.

The Italian tattoo artist has been a social media sensation before because she has done some rather bizarre tattoo jobs for her paying clientele. One strange tattoo that earned her attention on social media was when she inked a fringe onto a customer’s face.

She captioned the viral TikTok clip with, “He always loses glasses, and so he gets them tattooed.”

Although Altobelli claims that this client really got the glasses tattooed onto his face, many fans are less than convinced and believe it was all a prank to get the tattoo artist some publicity and attention. And if that’s the case, it has worked because the clip has been viewed more than sixteen million times and has received more than ten thousand comments from people across the entire globe.

The video opens with the tattoo artist removing the stencil. She then dabs her needle in black ink and begins to tattoo thick black lines on the man’s face. The customer seems to be in pain at this point because he winces when the needle touches the skin of his face.

Viewers wanted this to all be a prank because they thought the tattoo was ridiculous.

“Noooooooo! Pls tell me this is just a prank,” one fan wrote on TikTok.

Another person shared, “You all never got a tattoo before, and it SHOWS. And the fact that you all don’t know Sharpie when you see it.”

One critic noticed something was wrong with the situation and wrote, “The skin isn’t even red. It can’t be real; laugh out loud.”

Do you think this is a real tattoo or a prank?