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What are the steps involved in tattooing?
There are three general parts in tattooing: The fun part, the ticklish part, and the part where you cry from the pain.

The fun part is where you get to choose the actual design that’ll be placed on your skin for the rest of your life. That said, we strongly advise against getting your girlfriend’s name tattooed on whatever part of your body.

After choosing the tattoo of your dreams, the tattoo artist then draws the design onto your skin. Don’t get too ticklish though, otherwise that awesomely epic dragon you’re getting on your back might look more like a rather agreeable chicken.

Next comes the painful part. Of course, it all depends on your threshold for pain, but it’s safe to say that eating ice cream is still a more pleasant experience. The tattoo artist’s experience plays a role too, because if the artist’s hands are too heavy, the punctures created will be much deeper, and will cause more pain and bleeding.

The actual tattooing process involves several parts. The first step is outlining or black work, which involves the use of a single-tipped needle to trace the primary lines of the design. Shading comes next, which involves the use of thicker ink and different needles for more solid lines. After that, the artist then proceeds to color the tattoo. When all of that is done, final cleaning and bandaging take place, and voila, you now have a tattoo.

So it’s really just as simple as depositing ink on the skin, is it?
The short answer is yes, but the processes that you body undergo are a bit more complicated than that. Let’s try to break it down. First, the ink is injected, that much we know. Now as the ink seeps into the skin layer, the body starts to react. Ink is a foreign material, and so, the immune system’s phagocytes proceed to engulf the pigment particles. As this happens, the injured tissue on the epidermis form scabs and then subsequently flakes away, taking excess surface pigment with it. The ink in the dermis though remains trapped below the epidermis. That trapped ink is called a tattoo.

Click here to read our interview with The Tattoo Anthropologist!