Tattoo Science

Tattoo Science Nearly one in five people in America has a tattoo. So these permanent, portable articles of art are clearly an essential part of our culture -- but how do they run? What makes a tattoo permanent, and can you really get rid of it? Well, tattoos task by taking advantage of such structures of your scalp, and the members of the ink that are used. Your skin, for starters, is made up of three major layers of cells. On top, there's the epidermis, which is exposed to the environment. Below that, there's the dermis, and it's full of whisker follicles and sweat glands. And below that, you find the subcutaneous layer of flab and connective tissue. A tattoo needle drives the ink all the way through the epidermis. But it doesn't actually inject the ink -- instead, it's coated with pigment, kind of like a paintbrush. And the ink is assimilated through capillary activity -- it only gets sucked down through your tissues into the dermis. This is deep enough that the ink won't just flake away as "we're losing" skin cells from your epidermis over the period. And it's also why to get a tattoo hurts.

The dermis is full of nerve endings that feel pressure, temperature, and ache. So jamming a bunch of tiny needles into that layer initiates at the heap of those receptors. Some people say that get tattoos on bony regions hurt "the world's largest" because there's no flab to act as a cushion, but there's not really any scientific testify to back that up. You can probably safely assume that your most sensitive body parts -- like the hands and look -- would be somewhat painful to have tattooed because they have the highest density of nerve end. Now, even though getting a tattoo can be somewhat painful, many tattoo artists recommend that you avoid taking painkillers -- even aspirin -- before your session. That's because those drugs can thin your blood, which makes the tattooing process more difficult.

Thinner blood is necessary that the needle makes more bleeding, attaining it harder to see the region being tattooed, and that only attains things harder for the tattoo artist. So save the aspirin for after your artwork is done. And it'll be got a few weeks for your scalp to end. Get a tattoo triggers an immune answer in your figure, which tries to assault the ink as if it were an infectious invader.

Normally, your white blood cells clean up after serious injuries, breaking down and gobbling up any foreign affair. And your white blood cell does manage to clear away some of the smallest specks of ink, which is why a brand-new tattoo fade-out in the first couple of weeks. But most of the pigment particles are too big to get eaten up and cleared away. So whatever your white blood cells can't eat up gets absorbed by nearby connective cells called fibroblasts -- and the ink just sorta hangs out in there. Forever Tattoo Science. Which is why tattoos are pretty much permanent. Mostly. The fact is, even the most awesome tattoo will fade with time.That is tattoo science for you. As your scalp ages, your fibroblasts die off and are replaced with new ones, so over an hour, the ink migrates a little as the cell turnover. Fading can also be caused by sunshine exposure -- the UV rays in sunlight break down the tattoo pigment, so more of it can be cleared away by white blood cells.

Tattoo A science of course, if you end up with a truly dreadful tattoo -- or if maybe you merely don't love Limp Bizkit as much as you used to -- we do have the technology to delete your tattoo. Predominantly. Laser tattoo removal works by utilizing hot to break up the ink pigment particles into even smaller pieces. Then, your white blood cells can finally clear them away, just like they always wanted. But the color of your tattoo can determine how hard it'll be to remove. Black tattoos tend to be the easiest to get rid of since they absorb almost all wavelengths of brightness, so they heat up and break apart when dealt with at pretty much any wavelength. Other colorings -- like cherry-red, green, blue-blooded, and lily-white -- require special lasers, to make sure that the wavelength being used is the one that will be most easily absorbed by the pigment. But even with the proper laser, tattoo removal doesn't( always) remove all of the ink -- and on top of being extremely painful, it has its own probabilities, including scarring.

So if you're going to get a tattoo, don't bank on being able to get rid of it if you change your psyche! As tattoos become more mainstream, we can hope that we'll be able to develop better links and improve our removal techniques. But in the meantime, like I always suppose, see before you ink. Thanks for watching this chapter of SciShow, to be submitted to you by our patrons on Patreon.