Tattooing on skin presentation

how does the ink get into the skin?

A need is puncture into the skin at anywhere from 50-3000 times per minute

this is creating trauma as well as thee fact that there’s a foreign substance being deposited into the skin

when our body deals with trauma, usually immune system and the inflammatory system gets activated.

inflammation is getting white blood cells to the site of injury, infection, or to deal with foreign substances.

as the white blood cells get called to the area, they’ll leave these white blood vessels and then go roam through the tissue.

specific white cells are called macrophages which engulf the foreign substances that could be viruses, bacteria, dead tissue, and debris.

in this case they are trying to engulf the ink. This is cashed phagocytosis. This process is used to breaking down biological substances, however ink can include dye, plastics, and even solids that our immune system or our white blood cells are not equipped to break down well or digest.

so they try to isolate and contain it and not let this ink go to any other areas of the body.

those white blood cells get some of that ink from the collagen, and even engulf some of the dead fibrocytes, ave that in stays in them.

why does the in stay?

tattoos are relatively permanent. What scientists have started to find is that when macrophages that engulf the ink, when they die, they release the ink.

then a new macrophage comes in and engulfs that ink. Like this engluf, release, engluf, release…is a kind of cyclic process, that happens to maintain the tattoo in that area.

Brand New Tattoo: where does the ink sit and why?

The ink sits in the dermis, because if it were to sit in the epidermis, which is made up of epithelial tissue, then it would end up only lasting four weeks. This is because the upper dermis is made up of up to 50 layers of cells. These cells make copies of each other and constantly go from the bottom to the top, due to the lack of blood supply, and will end up flattening, what happens is every time a cell comes from the bottom to the top it will rise up and end up shutting off the skin cells. The skin cells will slough off, but so will the ink on the skin. The dermis, however, is better to have the ink injected into because it has cells known as fibre sites that produce a protein, fibre called collagen. Collagen is one of the most abundant proteins in the skin , the dermis is also called the irregular connective tissue. The connective tissue goes different ways and that’s why the skin is so stretchy and able to be mobile.

Why does the ink fade?

A couple of theories:

As a macrophage dies and releases that ink the new incoming macrophage engulfs most of the ink and some of the smaller broken down ink particles will get taken away into the lymphatic vessels. This is likely contributing to the fading of tattoos over time. but also uv light.

blown out tattoo: why does the tattoo look blurry?

that’s because the ink is sitting in the hypodermics which is made out of a different tissue then than the two above: Adipose tissue (fatty tissue)

The nature of this tissue is more of an oily type of a tissue. And if ink gets into that layer because of the oily tissue it can kind of blur the lines or dissipates into the skin a bit more.

Also tends to deal with how much pressure they put on the skin.

brand new tattoo?

a fresh tattoo sits in the epidermis and the dermis when the ink first gets deposited in the skin.

why the ink is more noticeable for other people:

It is more noticeable for people with more pale skin to see a blown out tattoo than people with more darker skin because of the lack of melanin that creates the vast difference between the skin and the tattoo.