Tattoos can be very painful. Tattoos require the use of large needles and blood. They can take several hours to complete. It can take a while and be quite painful.
But tattoos aren’t just for decoration—they can also cover up scars, guide cancer radiation treatments, or restore nipples after breast surgery. Patients with serious allergies, diabetes, epilepsy or other severe conditions may find tattoos useful as medical alerts.
A group of scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology sought to make it easier to administer them.
What is a Painless Tattoo?
Modern tattoo machines use electromagnetic force that moves needles at a high frequency—up to several thousand times per minute—in and out of the skin as they deposit liquid ink. The needles penetrate the skin in a range of a few hundred micrometers to up to two millimeters.
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Not only is there pain, but tattooing can also cause skin reactions or infection.
Microneedle patches are already being used by doctors for minimally invasive drug delivery. They eliminate biohazardous sharps waste, cause little pain and bleeding, and do not require any surgery. These patches are easy to apply and cost less than $50.
The Georgia Tech researchers then took the microneedle patch idea and turned it into a tiny tattoo machine. Each microneedle of the patch is a dot or pixels in an image. To create tattoo symbols and letters, as well as other medical/decorative images on the skin, they used single, multi, changing-color, and UV-visible tattoo inks.
After just a few seconds, apply the patch to your skin. The microneedles release their ink.
“We’ve miniaturized the needle so that it’s painless, but still effectively deposits tattoo ink in the skin,”Mark Prausnitz was the principal investigator of the paper, and he wrote it. Publication in open source journal iScience. “This could be a way not only to make medical tattoos more accessible, but also to create new opportunities for cosmetic tattoos because of the ease of administration.”
The tattoos were tested on rats, and they were then followed up one year later. The tattoos remained intact with minimal distortion—similar to the changes that happen with tattoos as humans age and bodies change.
There are many uses for microneedle ink
Tattoos can be used in medicine to display the year of an injection. Researchers tested the idea by tattooing the number 20 onto a rat. They also created stars, hearts and QR codes.
The scientists also tested tattoos visible only when they were exposed to heat and light. They wrote that similar tattoos could be created that respond to glucose levels and other stimuli, which would make them useful for people with diabetes.
Technology could also encode information into the skin of animals, instead of simply clipping or attaching an ear tag.
Although the art of microneedle tattoo may not be as good as it could be, scientists admit that they might never be able to replicate the skill of skilled tattooists.
“The goal isn’t to replace all tattoos, which are often works of beauty created by tattoo artists,” Prausnitz wrote. “Our goal is to create new opportunities for patients, pets, and people who want a painless tattoo that can be easily administered.”