Why Do Tattoos Last Forever?

Health Wellness

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For many centuries, different cultures have used various means to turn their skin into artwork, with the most common artwork being in the form of tattoos.

Some cultures used bamboo slivers dipped in different plant pigments to puncture the skin and created a permanent design. Other cultures used finely pointed pieces of bone, dipped in pigment.

The methods used by some Pacific people groups can take hours and be excruciatingly painful, but enduring the ordeal helps with the passage from boyhood to manhood.

As a boy, I was always fascinated by the tattoo my dad got on his upper arm while he was in the US Navy during World War II. It was of a hula dancer and he could flex his muscles fairly rapidly to make her dance. My two older brothers and I loved to watch him make his tattoo dance, as did many of the neighborhood boys, until my mom made him go to another tattoo artist and have her breasts covered with a bikini top (the breasts were naked before).

Today, most tattoos are created in tattoo parlors where they use a needle machine that works very fast in penetrating the skin.

For some strange reason, lots of people get tattoos. Some are signs of gang or crime organization membership, others are more of a social symbol like those you see on so many athletes today and others are just to say you have a tattoo but leave it up to a person’s imagination as to where it is located. My wife’s family is fairly conservative, but a number of them got small tattoos in various locations just because.

Have you ever wondered why tattoos seem to last forever? Yes, they tend to fade a little over time, but they never go away. My dad got his tattoo around 1943, and it was still clearly visible when he died in 2014 at the age of 92.

We’ve all been taught that the skin constantly dies off and is replaced with new cells, so shouldn’t tattoos also eventually flake off and disappear? No, and there is a good reason.

Have you ever heard of a macrophage? It’s a specific type of white blood cell that is part of the immune system. For some reason, when tattoo ink is injected into the skin, the macrophages respond and take in the ink. Once filled with the ink, the macrophage remains in the dermis (middle layer of the skin), holding the ink in place.

Macrophages live for a couple of years and then die. When they die, they release the tattoo ink and guess what? New macrophages rush in and gobble up the ink and take the place of the dead cells. Over time, the process is repeated over and over, maintaining a tattoo for the life of the person.

So, the reason tattoos last for the rest of your life is due to your immune system working as it should.

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