Super-slow motion and close-up video of how tattoo needles push ink into your skin

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Originally published at: Super-slow motion and close-up video of how tattoo needles push ink into your skin | Boing Boing

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I was really surprised that Dan wasn’t the test subject for this; he is usually the one naked, soaking wet and writhing in pain or mirth in these videos.

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[warning! tedious nerdy crap ahead. proceed to escape pods!]
torture aside (“death of a thousand cuts” pfff… just a thousand?), here’s the notion which always furrows the brow of this biochemist/nerd: dyes/pigments are colored because they have a lot of mobile molecular orbitals and a lot of carcinogens also have a lot of mobile molecular orbitals, (essentially because DNA reacts with soluble electrophiles). boring, right? well, here’s where it gets complicated because no matter how good a tattooist is some of that dye ends up in the blood-stream travels the lymphatic system and is detectable in liver cells. It’ll be a slow and stochastic risk and (unlike say tobacco → lung cancer) any tumor will likely be spatially separate from any tattoo site; but do we really need another vague source of cancer in our lives? So if i were a parent i think i’d really try to steer the younguns toward something a lot less permanent (e.g. let them get their ears, or whatever, pierced)

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Needles pierce your skin? I never! Just got permanent eyeliner makeup - after my eye injury in lefty & no longer being able to apply on both eyes. Not so bad.

Now Fluorouracil treatment - or electrolysis- that hurts.

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Completely unrelated to tattoo needles in slow-motion is…

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…this photo of Weird Al, which for some reason accompanied this article in my Feedly feed.

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I assumed that someone just got a great Weird Al tattoo.

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The thing is, you can’t get a tattoo (legally) until age 18, which is also legal adulthood, so there’s nothing you can do if your kid decides to get one on their 18th birthday.

I consider it a parenting win that one of my kids – the one who was always fascinated by tattoos – waited about a year after becoming an adult before getting the first one. I always said: don’t do it on the spur of the moment, carry the image around with you for a year to make sure you really want it permanently on your body.

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Same, same. And that’s the only reason why I clicked on this post. Anything with Weird Al has to be awesome. Even though I feel duped, it was a pretty good video.

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I am a parent, both me and my partner are tatt-less. We’ve sufficiently scared the older one (19yo) of needles in general, so much so she doesn’t even have pierced ears (AFAIK, anyway). We don’t talk smack about tatts (or I’d be doing it all the time, freakin’ everyone has one or a hundred these days!) but we do talk about their near permanence and what it means to regret something. @theophrastus - Thanks for the carcinogen info, I’ll use that too.

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