But by and large, the ink stays inside of macrophages, and thus stays put. But in heavily tattooed people, they can end up turning “the color of the ink,” says Gary Kobinger, an immunologist at the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch. Those major immunological hubs are normally off-white. Some pigment may also end up shuttled to lymph nodes. Over time, the edges of tattoos may get a bit fuzzier as the ink passes from cell to cell. But that ink then immediately gets snatched up and wolfed down by another macrophage in the vicinity that more or less takes its predecessor’s place, no more than perhaps a few micrometers away-less than the width of a human hair. At the end of a macrophage’s days- or weeks-long life, it begins to come apart, releasing the pigment at its core. Sandrine Henri, an immunologist at France’s Center of Immunology of Marseille-Luminy, and her colleagues have found that macrophages’ taste for ink can help explain why tattoos so tenaciously stick around, even after the cells die. Read: The benefits of a foreign-language tattoo
#Tattos for my story isnt over yet skin#
When ink is visible at the surface of the body, it’s not just interlaced among skin cells-it’s shining out from the bellies of macrophages that can’t digest it. The pigment particles lodge themselves inside macrophages’ innards, refusing to be broken down.
#Tattos for my story isnt over yet Patch#
So when inks get gulped down by immune cells such as skin-dwelling macrophages-which spend their lives devouring pathogens, cellular debris, and other schmutz within just a teeny patch of flesh-it can transform into a microscopic version of gum. The particles in pigments are bulky and difficult for an immune cell’s enzymes to degrade. That mission is generally quite successful-allowing burns to heal, scars to fade, and scabs to fall away-except, for some reason, when ink gets involved. Those cells’ prime directive is to suss out anything foreign and destroy it so the healing process can begin. The skin is the immune system’s “first barrier,” and is heavily stocked with fast-acting defensive cells that can leap into action when it’s breached, says Juliet Morrison, a virologist at UC Riverside.
When a tattoo is stamped onto skin, the body considers it an assault. Our immune system is constantly doing its darndest to destroy them-and understanding why it fails could clue us in to one of our bodies’ most important functions, even when we leave the skin blank. One of the strangest and least-studied enigmas, though, is how tattoos survive at all.
But much of tattooing remains mysterious: Scientists still aren’t sure what makes certain tattoos fade fast, why others stick around when they’re supposed to disappear, or how they react to light. The practice still involves carving wounds into permanent, inked-in shapes that we find aesthetically pleasing. In the thousands of years that tattoos have been around, not much has changed. It was my first tattoo, and likely not my last. Into every jab went black ink, eventually forming the shape of double quotation marks.
I felt as if I were being attacked by a microscopic cavalry of crabs. In 2018, I paid a man a couple hundred dollars to repeatedly jam several needles into the skin of my right wrist.
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