American researchers have developed a tattoo patch containing micro-needles. This innovation would make it possible to tattoo oneself at home, without pain and at a lower cost.
- One in five French people is tattooed, i.e. 20% of the population. A figure that has doubled in 10 years.
- The tattoo is generally considered painful: pain receptors (nociceptors) are particularly abundant in the lower layer of the epidermis. Sharp pain is felt at the first needle strokes.
- This new tattoo, in the form of a patch containing miniaturized needles, would allow you to tattoo yourself without pain.
A tattoo is cool, but it hurts a little. Now imagine that instead of enduring painful pricks for hours sitting in the tattoo parlour, you could get a tattoo yourself with a simple patch? And for less!
This is what the discovery of researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology could allow. They have developed inexpensive, painless and bloodless tattoos that can be self-administered from home, in the form of a skin patch containing microscopic needles.
Miniaturized needles
Tattoos usually use large needles to repeatedly puncture the skin to get a good image, a long and painful process. The research team has developed micro-needles smaller than a grain of sand, made of tattoo ink that are deposited very effectively in the skin. The microneedles can be pressed once into the skin and then dissolve, letting the ink penetrate in minutes without having to bleed.
“We’ve miniaturized the needle so it’s painless while still effectively depositing tattoo ink into the skin”, declares Mark Prausnitz in this study published in the journal iScience and of which he is the main author.
How does this patch work?
Micro needle patch tattoos imprint a design that can include letters, numbers, symbols and pictures. By arranging the micro-needles in a specific pattern, each micro-needle acts like a pixel to create a tattoo image of any shape or pattern. The patch is then applied to the skin for a few minutes, during which time the micro-needles dissolve and release the tattoo ink.
Different colored tattoo inks can be incorporated into the micro needles. The researchers even created patches sensitive to environmental factors such as light or temperature changes: the tattoo will only appear with ultraviolet light or higher temperatures. This provides tattooed people with privacy, as they reveal their tattoo only when they want to. These tattoos can last for at least a year and are likely to be permanent, but could also be loaded with temporary tattoo ink for short term medical and cosmetic needs.
Other possible applications
Besides that, these painless tattoos could have many other applications. Because tattoos are also used in medicine to cover scars, guide repeated cancer radiotherapy treatments or restore nipples after breast surgery. These new patch tattoos can also be used in place of bracelets as medical alerts to communicate serious medical conditions such as diabetes, epilepsy or allergies.
They can also be used to encode information into the skin of animals: rather than cutting off the ear or putting an ear tag on animals to indicate sterilization status, a painless and discreet tattoo could be applied to the square. It was for this application that Prausnitz’s team had started working on patch tattoos before realizing that the technology could also be effective for humans.