Nowadays you see more and more people with tattoos. I have a son who is under. I wonder what the ink used does to your body. It doesn’t seem healthy to me, but my son doesn’t want to hear that. I don’t talk about it anymore, but I do worry.
Joris Bartstra, journalist with a medical degree.
Quite a few doctors share your concerns, but so far it doesn’t seem to be too bad. The most common problems with tattoos are skin infections, allergic reactions to the ink, and skin sensitivity to the sun. These are problems you can do something about. Your real nightmare, of course, is that harmful substances leak from the tattoos that continue to circulate in your body and eventually cause serious illness. It is believed that when getting a tattoo, about a third of the ink does not remain in the skin, but is absorbed by your body. The ink can be found in the lymph nodes of people with tattoos, and some types of ink contain carcinogens. Yet no case of cancer has ever been described that could be directly attributed to tattoos, while in many countries nearly half of the population has a tattoo. If it was really very harmful, we would have seen more misery.
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