Eyes on the Prize: Denver Duo Sets Guinness World Record For Most Eyeball Tattoos on the Body (Again)

Inside the buzzing walls of Nocturnal Tattoo on West 20th Avenue, something extraordinary is etched into the skin and the records. Nocturnal owner and artist Stoke Lucero, as well as tattoo enthusiast Chadwyck Minson, set the Guinness World Record for the most eyeballs tattooed on a male body.

Their count? Sixty-five. But as of June 27, following an official count by a doctor as stipulated by the organization, that number had risen to 100, meaning the duo had officially beaten their own record.

"After I got the 65 eyeballs tattooed, I came in to get another tattoo, and I was like, 'Why don't we just add another 35 and make it an even 100 eyeballs?'" recalls Minson, sitting in the front of the tattoo shop where he'd broken his own world record.

"And I'm always ready to do more," Lucero says, without missing a beat.

"Me, too, clearly," Minson says, gesturing down towards the myriad of eyeballs inked into his right leg.
The pair met in 2018, when Lucero did Minson’s back piece. Their shared creative sensibilities soon gave rise to the eyeball sleeve, a long-evolving idea that took shape over several years and countless hours under the needle.

"He’s a pretty open-minded tattoo collector, so he has a lot of cool, creative ideas, and that’s how we got started on the eyeball leg sleeve," Lucero says. "Chad originally had some other tattoo on his leg, and we were trying to figure out a way to incorporate that into a sleeve. I came up with the idea for the eyeballs."

"Some of them, like Stoke was saying, were preexisting,” Minson adds. “But last year is really when we started.”

“But I’d say the process altogether really started about four years ago,” Lucero clarifies.

The result is a sprawling, visually striking leg sleeve packed with eyes — each uniquely styled and encased in subtle environmental clues that suggest which creature it belongs to. More than just a visual spectacle, the sleeve is grounded in personal symbolism and spiritual meaning for Minson.

"When you look back in history and culture, eyes were used to protect or ward off evil spirits," he says. "Then I’m a Reiki master teacher, so I work with people’s energies and stuff like that, so we do a lot of stuff with animals. I wanted to figure out a way to portray the animals that are special to me. Once we figured out the eyeballs, I asked Stoke to incorporate them in such a way that some of the surrounding stuff around the eye would reveal what it was."

The Guinness journey began when Lucero and Minson realized that there was no existing record for the most eyeball tattoos.

“We introduced the idea to Guinness to see if they were willing to take on something like that,” Lucero says. “We noticed that there wasn’t a record, so we actually set the bar.”

“You have to submit an application, and they go back through all their databases to verify if there is a record or not,” Minson adds. “If there’s not, then you get the approval to go ahead and do it. Then you have a long checklist of things that you have to submit before you can be granted the record.”

That process alone can take a while. “It takes about twelve to fourteen weeks to review the application,” Minson says. “Then once that’s reviewed, it’s however long it takes you to get all your documentation and stuff back to them. Then, once you have everything, it’s another four to six weeks.”

The plan was to submit all the final paperwork necessary to update the record to reflect Minson’s 100 eyeballs by the first week of July. Based on their past experience, Minson estimates Guinness will officially update the record “in about a month.”
While Guinness is still processing its paperwork, Lucero is keeping busy at his shops, which he says are usually "booked out like six weeks, and I’m doing three tattoos a day." Lucero, who’s been tattooing since his early twenties and giving stick-and-pokes since he was a kid, opened the first Nocturnal Tattoo twelve years ago. Now he operates two locations in the Denver metro area, with a combined staff of twenty artists.

“This shop I’ve broken the world records in,” he says. “I’ve broken two world records here: one for the same name tattooed on the body and then for the most eyeballs, which we set.” That first record, achieved in 2020 when Lucero tattooed his wife’s name 300 times, was later reclaimed by a UK artist.

"He originally had it; we beat it and he beat it again, so he and I are kind of going back and forth," Stoke says. "The woman I was tattooing was actually my wife. We’ve talked about adding more names, and I think she wants to go ahead and do it, but I also have some other records in mind that I want to break. I want to do the most feather and possibly the most insect tattoos."

Still, for Lucero, the artistry comes first. “One of the challenges is getting the eyes to be different,” he says. “I wanted to make it a work of art for him, not just simply trying to beat the world record. So I try to make it a work of art instead of just flat. It’s not enough to just break the record — I want it to look good, too.”

Minson, who grew up in Colorado Springs and has lived in Denver since 2000, remembers getting his first tattoo, a tribal dolphin, in 1996. He jokes that he has been "pretty much in trouble" since then. Over the years, he’s become heavily tattooed, with Lucero completing several large-scale works on him, including multiple sleeves and his back.

"I always have stuff I want to get tattooed," Minson says. "But the trouble is trying to find space for them, because I’m getting kind of low on real estate."

These days, strangers often stop Minson in public to get a closer look at his leg. “They’re like, ‘Whoa!’ I get stopped at the grocery store, Home Depot or wherever, at least two or three times a week,” he says. “Most of the time, people just want to chat or look at them. People often ask, ‘What made you do it?’ and that type of stuff.”

He’s even had a few awkward encounters. “I was in the grocery store and this lady was looking at my legs and said, ‘Do you have anywhere it’s not tattooed?’” Minson recalls with a laugh.

For Lucero, the goal is to keep growing. “I just want to gain more national attention by doing conventions, traveling and branching out,” he says. “We are a staple here in Lakewood and Colorado, but we are just trying to expand. We want to do more amazing things along the way.”
Though Minson's sleeve might be finished — for now — both Lucero and Minson see the project as part of something larger. It’s a snapshot of where they are in their lives, their friendship and their ever-evolving relationship with tattooing as both ritual and art.

“The tattoo world is very competitive,” Lucero says. “But you just try to compete against yourselves. Every tattoo you do, you try to do the next one better. Every record you beat, try to keep going instead of worrying about everyone else.”

Nocturnal Tattoo has stores at 6474 West 20th Avenue and 2099 Wadsworth Boulevard in Lakewood; learn more at nocturnaltattoo.com.