Every tattoo is a fascinating negotiation between ink and body, and between the act and the mind. How a needle deposits pigment, how the immune system responds, how skin structure varies by placement, why certain inks fade or shift colour over decades, and what the entire process does to the person psychologically, from anticipation through the session itself to the behavioural changes that follow it. Tattoo science answers questions that most artists learn through trial and error, if they learn them at all, and that most clients experience without ever understanding. The articles here cover the biology, chemistry, physics, sociology, and neuropsychology of what happens before, during, and after getting tattooed.
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O’Reilly was not working from a single flash of inspiration when he built his tattoo machine. In a 1898 interview with the New York Sun, he described trying a dental plugger first — an electromagnetic device invented by William Bonwill for filling teeth — and then an Edison pen, but found each “too weak.” After what he described as many trials, he (…).
A tattoo is ink trapped in the second layer of the skin. Everything else exists to get the ink to that layer and keep it there. The process is mechanical (a needle punctures the skin and deposits pigment), biological (the body reacts to the wound and to the foreign material), and a negotiation between the ink’s desire to stay put and the body’s effort to remove it.