What makes tattoos permanent? - Claudia Aguirre

Tattoos have often been presented

in popular media as either marks of the dangerous and deviant

or trendy youth fads.

But while tattoo styles come and go,

and their meaning has differed greatly across cultures,

the practice is as old as civilization itself.

Decorative skin markings have been discovered in human remains

all over the world,

with the oldest found on a Peruvian mummy dating back to 6,000 BCE.

But have you ever wondered how tattooing really works?

You may know that we shed our skin,

losing about 30-40,000 skin cells per hour.

That's about 1,000,000 per day.

So, how come the tattoo doesn't gradually flake off along with them?

The simple answer is that tattooing involves

getting pigment deeper into the skin

than the outermost layer that gets shed.

Throughout history, different cultures

have used various methods to accomplish this.

But the first modern tattooing machine

was modeled after Thomas Edison's engraving machine

and ran on electricity.

Tattooing machines used today

insert tiny needles, loaded with dye, into the skin

at a frequency of 50 to 3,000 times per minute.

The needles punch through the epidermis,

allowing ink to seep deep into the dermis,

which is composed of collagen fibers, nerves, glands, blood vessels and more.

Every time a needle penetrates, it causes a wound

that alerts the body to begin the inflammatory process,

calling immune system cells to the wound site

to begin repairing the skin.

And it is this very process that makes tattoos permanent.

First, specialized cells called macrophages

eat the invading material in an attempt to clean up the inflammatory mess.

As these cells travel through the lymphatic system,

some of them are carried back with a belly full of dye into the lymph nodes

while others remain in the dermis.

With no way to dispose of the pigment,