Tattoos
I absolutely love tattoos, almost any kind and almost
anywhere. Every time I get a chance to talk about them, I usually do. I worked
in a tattoo shop when I was twenty for two years and I have heard many
misconceptions about them. So here I go again.
The
practice of tattooing means different things in different cultures. In early
practice, decoration appears to
have been the most common motive for tattooing, and that still holds true
today. In some cultures, tattoos served as identification of the wearer’s rank or status in a group. For
example, the early Romans tattooed slaves and criminals. Tahitian tattoos
served as rites of passage,
telling the history of the wearer’s life. Boys reaching manhood received one
tattoo to mark the occasion, while men had another style done when they
married. Sailors traveling to exotic foreign lands began to collect tattoos as souvenirs of their journeys (a dragon
showed that the seaman had served on a China station), and tattoo parlors
sprang up in port cities around the globe.
Unbelievably,
some scientists say that certain marks on the skin of the Iceman,
a mummified human body dating from about 3300 B.C., are tattoos. If that is
true, these markings represent the earliest known evidence of the practice.
Tattoos found on Egyptian and Nubian mummies date from
about 2000 B.C
Today,
tattoos are created by injecting ink
into the skin. Injection is done by a needle
attached to a hand-held tool. The tool moves the needle up and down at a rate
of several hundred vibrations per minute and penetrates the skin by about one
millimeter. What you see when you
look at a tattoo is the ink that is left in the skin after the tattooing. The
ink is not in the epidermis,
which is the layer of skin that we see and the skin that gets replaced
constantly, but instead intermingles with cells
in the dermis and shows through
the epidermis Today, a tattoo machine is an electrically powered, vertically
vibrating steel instrument that resembles a dentist’s drill (and sounds a
little like it, too). It is fitted with solid needles that puncture the skin at
the rate of 50 to 3,000 times a minute. The sterilized needles are installed in
the machine and dipped in ink, which is sucked up through the machine’s tube
system. Then, powered by a foot switch much like that on a sewing machine, the
tattoo machine uses an up-and-down motion to puncture the top layer of the skin
and drive insoluble, micrometer-sized particles of ink into the second (dermal)
layer of skin, about one-eighth inch deep.
Being snapped by a
rubber band, a slight tickling, a bee sting, a sunburn,
being pinched, “pins ‘n needles” like when your foot’s asleep, numb, pinpricks,
tingling, like a drill going into your skin, uncomfortable -- all of these
phrases have been used to describe what it feels like to get a tattoo. Your personal tolerance for pain, the size and type of
your tattoo and the skill of the artist help determine the amount of pain
involved. If you have difficulty with an injection at the doctor’s office or if
the sight of blood makes you queasy, you might want
to think twice before visiting the tattoo parlor. (Try one of the massively
popular temporary tattoos or henna
tattoos, also temporary. They offer the "coolness" of a tattoo
without the pain, risk and expense.)
Choose wisely, one
busy physician who specializes in tattoo removal estimates that 50 percent of
people who get tattoos later regret them. Oops!
http://www.powerpaper.com/5_news_pr/pr040414.htm
this site is about a
semi-permanent tattoo
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/07/20/earlyshow/main710348.shtml
this site is about laser
tattooing fruit instead of stickers
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0724montini24.html
Do you tattoo?
http://tattoob2c.securesites.net/yellow_pages/cgi-bin/search.cgi
world wide tattoo directory
.