hey everybody I am Jake from the fireside tattoo Network and this is tattoo overview
whenever a needle hits the skin the ink on the needle actually disperses across the surface of the
skin the needle penetrates and when it retracts out of the skin it creates a vacuum that sucks
the ink into the hole that was left by the needle with this nugget of information what we know is
that we need to get as much ink into the hole that we poked before the hole closes up in order to do
that we want to reduce surface tension as much as possible
What you'll want to do is make the skin as soft as possible
And make the skin as consistent, across a number of clients, as possible.
And there's a really easy way to do that, and that's to have them
Moisturize 30 to 40 minutes before they come in.
You'll want silicon based moisturizers because more slippery the surface
the greater chance that you'll get good saturation.
Another big variable is the machine that we're using itself.
Ideally we would want a machine that hits the surface of the skin just hard enough to puncture it,
But retracts as fast as possible to increase the force of the vacuum.
So, in the explanation earlier I was talking about...
when a needle penetrates the skin and retracts it forms a vacuum
Does it matter the angle at which the needle penetrates the skin?
Because, any tattooer, or anyone who's been tattooing any period of time
knows that if you come at a tattoo from a 90 degree angle, kind of straight forward
you end up with a lot of bounce and very little penetration. And, if you're more
at a 45-degree angle, or sometimes, even a stronger angle depending on, you know, where you are, like
for example, in like a squishy part of a side I feel like I almost have to turn the tattoo
machine on its side to get solid saturation. Does that have any bearing on the on how the vacuum
And, also, the weight of the tissue that's closing up. So, there's a vacuum that's created,
is created, how strong the vacuum is?
Definitely, so, the more perpendicular you come at it the vectors of the force are going to be absorbed
in a way that's going to give you less saturation...
That's one part of it, is... there's the force part and then there's the geometry of the hole that's left behind
that vacuum is going to be evacuated and all of the tissue around is going to compress. What you're
really looking for is to get the tissue depth with the greatest amount of force going in so
you hit the depth that you're looking for and then when you pull out you're looking for the greatest
amount of suction force or capillary force that comes back into that hole. Well, if everything's
really squishy because you've hit it at a 90 degree perpendicular angle you've dissipated all
of that force because there's more tissue for it to travel through where if you hit it on an angle
there's two things; 1) there's less tissue, so all the force is gonna go up and outside of the body.
So, the vectors that come back are gonna be more compressed so you're gonna get greater suction.
That's one thing, and then the other aspect is: 2) the geometry at the hole. So, if you're perpendicular to
the surface it's going to be a circle and if you're coming at it from an angle it's going
to be elliptical, and the elliptical hole is going to allow the ink to run in faster.
A really good example of that is if you look at a surgical needle or a hypodermic needle. So a needle doesn't have a
bullet point on it, it's got a chamfered angle on it and the reason you want the chamfered angle on
that particular needle design is you want it to slide into the skin as fast as you can to cut and
slice through the skin. Kind of the same thing that you want with the tattoo ink where as you're
not trying to push the needle and you're actually trying to pull the ink and so that same principle applies.
So, as tattooers and even our clients know we're trying to get optimal saturation into the
dermis but we're passing through quite a few layers of epidermis, of skin that sloughs off
and that all is filled with ink as well whenever we poke that hole. What happens to those particles of ink?
Do they saturate, do they sink down into the dermis do they slough off with the skin?
Yeah, they slough off so over, you know, 30 days that skin is going to be replaced and whatever you're
seeing as you're looking at the skin you're seeing through that entire column that top part of the
column just is gone. So, your goal and objective is to make sure that whatever's in the dermis
has the highest saturation content.
What percentage, would you say, of the ink that's deposited a single stroke of the needle actually
stays in the dermis, would you have any idea?
So, 30% gets...people say metabolized off,
but that also....you know they're calculating that out as how much sloughs off.
A good way to look at it is, I've got, you know, a value of 10. Really, what I should expect is
that value that I'm looking at to be a 70.
And, that's why our tattoos look so much different healed than fresh.
When we're looking at them fresh we're looking at saturation all the way up through
the epidermis, after all that skin sloughs off we're looking through new skin cells that have no ink
particles in them whatsoever into the 70% that's left behind.
Yes, and then you have to factor in how much light gets absorbed
by the skin that grows over the top of it and what the color of that skin
is and how that might affect underlying colors. Teaser for future episodes!
Thanks again to our top secret S8 chemist for sharing his big brain with us!
If I am a machine builder I'm probably
looking at ways now to design a machine that retracts faster than it hits, or retracts at least
as fast as possible so that we fill our holes with tons of juicy ink! Thank you guys as always for
supporting what we do and we'll catch you next time.
Hey, I'd like to give a special shout out to our great friends at s8 tattoo.
Click the link in the description below to check out all of the
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(BLOOPER!!!!!)