Thinkin' Thursday - Tatties!

My first themed post for NaBloPoMo is going to combine my Tuesday and Thursday themes, as I'm going to learn how tattoos work! I have a total of 4 tattoos, and still don't quite understand how they work-- how deep in the skin they go, how they remain permanent, why they sometimes fade, and why they're so beautifully bad ass! So, my intarweb friends, please join me, along with Howstuffworks.com, as we embark on this journey to the land of tattoo knowledge!

INKIN'

• Tattoo inks typically consist of:
• A carrier, which is used to keep the pigment evenly distributed throughout the liquid. Some common carriers are ethanol, Listerine, and purified water.
• Pigment, which can be mineral, industrial organic, vegetable-based, or plastic based. Most pigments used today are metal salts.
• There are no laws stating that ink contents must be made available, so whether you get ink from a company, or your artist mixes his/her own ink, they're not obligated to tell you what the ink is made of. They could be using the souls of kittens and you would never know!

THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS:
(but not BARE arms, because you need tattoos)

• A tattoo gun is made of 4 components:
• A sterilized needle (either single needle or multiple needles, depending on what you're using it for)
  
• A tube system, which draws the ink through the machine
• An electric motor
• A foot pedal, like those used on sewing machines, which controls the vertical movement of the needle.

ONLY SKIN DEEP

• A tattoo gun moves a needle in and out of the skin about 50 to 30,000 per minute (depending on the speed of the motor and the foot pedal).
  
• The ink is deposited into the dermis, which is the layer below your epidermis (outer layer of skin). This is about a millimeter deep.
  
• Each time the needle enters the skin, a drop of ink is deposited.
  
• Tattoos are permanent because the cells in the dermis are much more stable than the cells in the epidermis. While fading may occur, most of the ink will stay in place for a lifetime.
  
• Oh crap! My tattoos are permanent? They didn't tell me that! I want my money back!

STEP-BY-STEP: The Tattoo Process

• The artist will start off by doing black line work with a single needle.
  
• Next, an artist does shading using various needles.
• The artist will then add color, again using various needles. Each line of color is overlapped to avoid holidays, which are areas where the ink is not present.
  
• After the tattoo artist finishes your tattoo, he or she will clean it off and bandage it.
  
• When you get home and take the bandage off, you will realize that the artist tattooed a cross atop of the crown you asked for, even though you despise organized religion. You will shudder at the thought of having Christian imagery permanently tattooed on your body, then proceed to mentally and verbally degrade yourself.
  

WOWEE ZOWEE! I sure did learn a lot today! I hope this post helped you better understand the tattoo process.

Now, in honor of tattoos and Jim Saraceno, I will leave you with this: