From Pigment to Portrait To Tattoo or not to Tattoo

Tattoos are part of our cultural heritage, often admired, often condemned. During the last few decades we saw a remarkable revival and tattoos became fashionable. Today about 100 million Europeans have at least one tattoo. Most of them are not aware of the corresponding health risks and the almost complete lack of any legal regulations, neither of the education and qualification of tattoo artists, nor the hygienical conditions of their equipment and the quality of the injected dyes. In order to shed light into the whole tattoo process, the procedure itself and the fate of the dyes in the customers skin are analyzed from a chemical perspective.