The suffering people endure for their art, hey?

Gregory David Roberts was forced to write Shantaram three times, because the manuscript was twice destroyed by prison guards, and some of Eric Clapton’s greatest work came after the tragic loss of his son’s life.

Enter model Katarina Zarutskie, then, who – gasp, shock, horror – was nipped on the arm by a shark whilst trying to nail the perfect ‘Gram shot.

This story has been covered by the likes of the BBC and CNN, but it’s the former we will start with:

…Zarutskie visited with her boyfriend and his family [in the Exuma islands in the Bahamas] last month, [and] she was keen to make the most of the beautiful sights.

After a family lunch in an area known as Staniel Cay, Katarina spotted people snorkelling and interacting with a pack of nurse sharks nearby.

Despite concern from her boyfriend’s family, she was keen to get into the waters to get some photographs with them…

She says that after a few minutes posing, a local resident on the pier encouraged her to lie back and float in the water.

“At this point people were starting to take photos and right as I lay back, after a few seconds, I was pulled under,” she says.

Her boyfriend’s father was photographing Katarina at the time, and accidentally caught the whole incident in a series of images.

Shall we see the sequence of shots, then? Fine.

Yes, that did leave a mark:

Makes mixing up Ard Matthews and Arno Carstens (or as one tweet pointed out, ‘not knowing your Ard from your Arno’) seem rather tame.

She has since done a host of interviews, including this effort:

At this point, some of you are probably leaning towards a ‘stupid Instagram model’ chirp, and you wouldn’t be the first.

Katarina has heard it all before:

She is upset at the way she has been stereotyped and accused of being social-media obsessed and careless. The model did not even plan to upload the images to her social media page until she was approached by journalists about her experience earlier this week.

Katarina also rejects accusations she ignored local advice or went into the water during feeding time.

“They took the information they wanted and really spun the story in a way that I’m a stupid blonde Instagram model,” she says.

“I’ve definitely received a lot of rude and hateful comments from people that were saying ridiculous things.”

“But it’s the internet right? I guess you know you have to take it with a grain of salt and it comes with the territory.”

Tough luck if you were hoping to snoop around on her Instagram account, because the model has set her account to private.

The 19-year-old is due to start a double-degree in nursing and business at the University of Miami shortly, but she’ll need to crack decent marks if she wants people to forget about the infamous shark nip incident.

#blessed.

[source:bbc]