skinsscribe

[skinsscribe]

I literally made a Tumblr just to respond to this-

So sorry to dump this huge essay here, but this is my niche within a niche! I’m a tattoo artist of 5+ years, used to work in human participant based research (tho in a phonetics lab), and am also someone with eczema who’s immunocompromised and allergic to everything- for people w medical concerns around tattooing, I regularly read through research articles that come out regarding this issue so I’d love to shed some industry insider info on this convo!

1) Color ink vs black ink:

This is a major component in both the issue surrounding allergies and cancer. If you are very allergy-prone/immunocompromised/suffer from an overreactive immune response (psoriasis, eczema, etc) I usually recommend staying away from all colored inks. Ink is made up of pigments which are metallic in nature that are suspended in different types of solutions (those can also be allergens). Those metals can cause reactions in people with the above issues, there are lots of documented studies proving this, and in my own experience this has been the case. Black ink however is very old, well documented, and safe. It is just carbon black suspended in either water, glycerin, or witch hazel, if you have an allergy concern with the solution, I recommend reaching out to your tattoo artist and finding an alternative. Colors, I would be much more skeptical about, and there are more documented risks for the above reasons. Older recipes used to use much less safe ingredients that were carcinogens, but these days in modern ink manufacturing are supposedly slightly better, but we still have limited info about them. You can still come across them though from dubious sources.

2) News Articles vs Research Articles

Please keep in mind news sites like CNN or others are not trying to give you good science, they're trying to get your clicks and to send the article to other people. They profit off of reactions, so I'm going to look as some research papers I see quoted a lot of break down some of the issues within them.

Source 1: This study discusses skin cancer and its correlation with red inks. I think this is a good place to start, because historically red ink has had some of the most hazardous ingredients used and today is known to be the most likely to cause allergic reactions in clients. If you have a history of metal allergies with jewelry, stay away from red ink. Though, this study was only looking at "160 cases of cutaneous tumors arising within tattoos" so it is already suffering from a huge confirmation bias. The study acknowledges "There was a lack of consistency of information in published case reports which limited the scope of our analysis. Small sample size was also a limitation of this review." https://www.jaadinternational.org/article/S2666-3287(24)00053-1/fulltext

In regards to studies:

Source 2: 

I feel like this is one of the better synopsis articles. It discusses several studies with solid sources and analyzes whether or not these risks are as severe as some sensationalized news platforms want you to believe.

In regards to the study that came out in May 2024, I have several critiques that the Harvard article agrees with. 

Key quotes being:

“...nearly all of the differences in rates of lymphoma between people with and without tattoos were not statistically significant…In fact, some of the other findings argue against a connection, such as the lack of a link between size or number of tattoos and lymphoma risk.”

“In addition, if tattoos significantly increase a person's risk of developing lymphoma, we might expect lymphoma rates in the US to be rising along with the popularity of tattoos. Yet that's not the case.” 

Looking at the studies figures and controls, it has way, way too broad of demographic for such a small sample size. Without control for tattoo size, color, age, there’s no sure fire way to determine what even in the process is trigger lymphoma. There’s too few lifestyle restrictions as well, and far too many external factors that could be influencing the increase in lymphoma for these subjects. If you’ve heard of the famous “ice cream sales causing murder rates to go up” example, while murder rates and ice cream sales correlate, they have no causation, the source of the two increasing simultaneously is the summertime. What other carcinogens have also gotten more popular as tattoos have taken off as well? Plastics have become more common than ever, non-stick pans, vapes, etc, I can think of dozens of things that could be correlated, but that’s why we need more studies.

Source 3:

This is an article I've seen quoted in a lot of news sites, but the methodology is also, not perfect. Really limited sample size of 36 participants. There's also several problems with subject control, such as subjects who smoke were not excluded. One of the participants is a truck driver, which also increases your chance of melanoma by a large percentage.

Another problem with this study, is a lot of these inks are 20+ years old, coming from a time when a lot of people weren't even buying ink in liquid form but powder pigments and DIY rehydrating them. I can't really even speculate on what these were made of bc its before my time. We have waaaay more quality control now, but also that means this study is discussing an ink that doesn't really exist now, so its hard to then use these results as predictive outcomes for tattoos being done today.

So far I haven't seen any research done in relation to tattooing that doesn't have some large methodology problems in it, which is a shame. This isn't to say that these studies are morally bad, or that they're just trying to knock on tattooing, but that these are more akin to pilot studies, which serve as the base to secure funding for larger more robust research. Research related to tattooing and its risks is still in its infancy. Until we get better funded studies, attempting to make generalizations about the population as a whole, is largely, not possible. I would say that the lack of care I often see around the medical industry in funding this is a good sign, since we have a for profit healthcare system, if a class action was thought to be possible, it would be hugely profitable and I think someone would snap that opportunity up, but that's my personal opinion.

3) In regards to regulation: 

FDA regulation is… not always the gold standard. This is the governing body who’s cool that your wheat is sprayed and grown in carcinogens. The industry is largely suspicious of the FDA wanting involvement due to the current attempts at government regulation in states failing massively. Coming from Oregon, a state where regulation of the industry has begun to happen, it is very much being controlled not by people within the industry but outsiders seeking to profit from it while only enforcing the optics of safety, and doing very little in actually keeping clients safer and providing higher quality services. If anything, it’s made the Oregon tattoo industry much less safe, and much more financially corrupt. It now costs $15,000 to get a tattoo license, and from what I’ve seen of these schools, there is no quality control of the artists, and haven taken the state exam, the questions are wildly out of date. But it doesn’t matter to them, because its just become another way for the state to milk trade industries for profit. Until a tattoo union is formed and can enforce regulation the way piecers have done with the APP Certification process, I have very little faith in any US governing body forming meaningful regulation. 

Currently the gold standard of ink is brands made in the USA and Europe, based on recipes that have been used and refined for decades. Europe sets the standard for quality control generally on many color inks, and we see some of the best tattoo products coming from there. The primary pigments under restriction right now are Pigment Blue 15 and Green 7, these are banned in the EU.

I also want to mention it is in our own best interest to purchase and provide the highest quality ink we can. However, there are many third party sources providing low quality cheap ink, and those are coming from mass manufacturing/drop shipping schemes like temu/amazon/etc and are imported from foreign countries, and you'll see these being used in sketchy low budget shops or home set ups. I've never seen professional shops use these.

4) Ink Suppliers:

As for the tattoo industry being “one foot in the super lax, counterculture boat while also having the other one solidly in the corporate, capitalist yacht” I do not agree with this statement. The people who work in the manufacturing side of the industry are generally extremely serious and committed to their trades. You can generally tell the grifter schemes from the actual industry professionals, bc the grifters went from being into crypto a few years ago, got some tattoos, and then went “oh I can make money off this” instead. Supply leaders have been in the industry for most of their lives and some of the companies have been around for decades now. Keep in mind though that large scale ink and needle manufacturing didn't really happen until the 90s.

Best ink sources are Dynamic Ink and Eternal, eternal supplying in-depth information about their solutions on their ink safety page.

In a study by Binghamton University dynamic ink was the only brand who had correct labeling across all their pigments (Eternal was not included in the study tho, but due to their commitment to ingredient labeling, I feel pretty confident in recommending them.) These are the inks I use and have had used on me with no problems.

Source: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.analchem.3c05687#

From what I can tell Micah ur not a tattoo artist? (though if u are then rip oops lol) and I think as close as you get to the industry as a client or adjacent, its hard to appreciate the nuances unless you're in it and dealing with the supply trade yourself. I don't mean to talk down to you I just want to add some info that I feel could be valuable. I definitely feel your complaints with the influx of people who don't give a shit, who steal designs and are just trying to print money. I've seen ur work stolen more times than I can count lmao idk how you deal with it. It's hard to try and continue to do ur best in an industry where it's almost more rewarding to act unethically. There's nothing stopping people from stealing art and buying unsafe gear. The amount of crappy artists who don't give a shit about the industry or their clients are everywhere these days, it's insanely frustrating. But I do want to also remind people that there are the torch carriers who are very invested in this industry, who love what they do, and want it to be as safe as possible.

Best advice I have for y'all is schedule a consultation with a new tattoo artist, sus out the shop and get a feel for them. Talk about your medical concerns, etc. If they're the type of person who doesn't have the time of day for that, you'll know who you're dealing with. But all of these concerns are genuine and worth discussing with your artist, so don't be afraid to advocate for yourself, and I hope some of the research articles I've linked are insightful as to what risks we understand now, and what we don't. Personally I am working on a corpus of research articles related to tattooing, I'm hoping to condense them into an easy to browse site at somepoint for this exact reason. Tattooing is a pseudo medical procedure and we should do our best to respect that.

TLDR; Grifters are going to grift. We are in a late stage capitalism era where it is very easy for under regulated goods and grifters to exploit holes in the industry, please do not look at those people though as examples of the industry as a whole, because many of us are very committed to the safety and quality of our work and we hate that this is happening to our industry. How regulation gets created though, IMO, has to involve tattoo artists, and I think ink and machine suppliers as well should be leading that charge. We've seen very successful quality control and regulation from the APP with piercing, and I think something like that would be much more successful in regulating tattooing than the FDA. For now though, please do your research! I am sorry that the onus of responsibility often falls on the client, but sadly that is true for all consumers in the US. 

Congrats on making it to the end im so sorry if there's typos y'all I tried

i was saving up for a tattoo but ur answer to that ask where u mention the stuff that goes into ink made me go down a rabbit hole and now i think i wont be getting a tattoo until ink is regulated... aside from the ink being full of stuff i know im allergic to my family is very cancer prone and im reading that tattoo ink may have a correlation with increased skin cancer risk. i feel like this should be talked about more. feeling sad about it but im glad u mentioned something about it otherwise i wouldnt have known

Yeah, as someone who's allergic to everything, has eczema, and a family history of cancer, I feel that. If you have a good artist whom is open to using inks that are either carcinogen-free or at least better tolerated it's not the end of the world, and I never want to discourage someone from doing something they want to do, especially art-related! That being said, I had some similar asks so I'm gonna use yours as a quick info-dump, so I apologize in advance!

I do want to be VERY clear: this is NOT a 'tattoos bad' wall of text, it's a 'art good but hold businesses and individuals accountable because right now everything is a trust system' wall of text. Everyone I know and love has tattoos, I just happen to be an artist who was pulled into the industry fairly out-of-the-blue 8 years ago, and have gotten to learn the intimate ins-and-outs of it because of that. This isn't ragebait, and it is strictly my reasons as to why I feel that the industry could benefit from some regulation and standardized education now that it is a very, very mainstream industry that the majority of individuals in my age range engage with but aren't privy to the details on. If you love tattoos, great! If you don't love tattoos, great! If you're an experienced professional in the industry, this is all stuff you've probably bounced off of once or twice, and can understand why it's frustrating.

The tattoo industry sorta has had one foot in the super lax, counterculture boat while also having the other one solidly in the corporate, capitalist yacht. While the studies that come out of the industry relating cancer risk to the ink content always stick strictly to skin cancer risk being 'negligible', it's important to note that the ink isn't going into your skin - it's going into the fatty tissue below the skin. The ink breaks down in that tissue over time, and gets filtered out by your body - the contents of the ink aren't on the top of the skin, they're being filtered through your other organs or pushed up to your skin. (I know this is an ultra-super-simplified version of what happens, but I don't want to give everyone a migraine with details.) I work with a ton of inks, paints, and pigments, and the pigments that are used in some inks aren't stuff I'd willingly handle with my bare hands, but I'm paranoid about that stuff. However,I absolutely wouldn't eat any of the pigments that are used in the creation of the ink used for tattoos, and none of it is stuff that I'd want in my liver or kidneys. I have a parent who's had cancer for 10+ years, so it's a pet topic of mine that I've had the opportunity to discuss with professionals whom work in the industry. The few times I've gotten to chat about inks used in tattoos, the response is the same as the public PR team's response. The standard on-record response is to cite skin cancer risks, and when asked about other types of cancer, specifically liver/kidney/reproductive, often it is deflected to some version of 'our customers are risk takers who live life on the edge, and don't conform to societal norms, and that demographic always has a higher rate of cancer.' The reality is that they intentionally don't test for that, because best case is the optics that they were selling something that they weren't that confident in, and the worst case response is a wall of lawsuits. Obviously, all that sounds ominous and shit, and while I doubt there's anything massive hidden there, my problem is that the corporate side regulates itself, which in the history of everything has never ended in ethical decisions and only ones that increase profit margins. When pressured, however, companies will lean into the 'it's tattoos man, don't be a downer' - but these are large, industrial corporations, not the dude down the street making art out of their garage. They have the money to test their own products and choose not to.

The other half of the problem is that foot in the pseudo-counterculture, lax, independent artist culture. There's no barriers to entry, minimal qualifications required, and so you can have people who have no business putting permanent ink on folks doing just that, en masse. Tattoos became a major fashion thing in the last 10 years, so we saw an explosion of tattoo studios with literally no experience in the industry kicking out tattoos. These same folks don't have experience in the arts (in a lot of cases) so they'll lift someone else's work as theirs to get a sale, which leads to someone having a design that may be associated with a group they do not wish to be associated with (IE: ultra-nationalist found out that his reaper design was from some ACAB shit I made, and he was not thrilled, even though I thought it was hilarious.) Additionally, a lot of the more questionable studios engage in super controversial sales tactics pressuring clients to move forward on projects when they aren't 100% comfortable (ie: you don't get to see the tattoo until you're in the chair, strictly to save time as to maximize profit on a permanent work of art, and to avoid your client changing their mind.) Back when I was starting out, a lot of the freelance work I received was coming up with designs to help fix those botched jobs, while sending folks to a credible artist, so I had the unfortunate experience of hearing every nightmare story ever. However, like any market that was opening up to big mainstream cashflow, the market ended up flooded so the skill of the average tattoo artist fell like a brick. Only in the last 6 months has the bubble popped with a ton of studios have had trouble staying afloat because the industry reached critical mass. I literally have more options in tattoo studio within a 10 block radius than grocery stores. Mind you, I'm talking about the large group of studios that engage with these practices, and that does in no way mean that I am specifically talking about your studio or your artist. If you work in the industry, you know the folks I'm talking about, and I'm so sorry they make your job so much harder.

This all comes together into a major shitstorm: under-qualified individuals offering a subpar product driving down prices, shoving out the actual qualified professionals, while operating in a legal gray area. Combined with the industrial ink companies that aren't keen on giving straight answers about the contents of their product leaves the entire industry in an absolutely dogwater spot, getting the worst of both worlds. This is not touching on the disgusting potential abuse of power that some individuals choose to take advantage of within these situations. With literally any small amount of regulation, the entire art form would be infinitely easier to get for individuals without having to do a background check on the entire operation. I hope that answers some questions, and I apologize for any typos in my incomprehensible wall of text!