CipherX applies painless permanent tattoos with dissolving microneedle patches
designboom.com
designboom.com
So, it's a neat gimmick, but it'll need a lot of work to be much more than that. It'd be neat for some small pieces to fill space I guess.
And a bit of a tangent, but I also have a pretty strong needle aversion, and I have not found that getting tattooed "feels" like there are any needles involved in the process. I know logically that it is a needle, but subjective process (the pain and visuals) really bears no resemblance to a needle.
Though, I assume a more practical point might be a robot that would have an ink-feeding extremely fast cycling device for doing tattoos that can complete them in a fraction of the time. Would suck for artists if you could just AI design your tattoo and have it done in minutes by a robot that can sense your movements and reactions and adjust in real time.
Maybe this belief comes from being a sysad - dot matrix printers never did me no harm, but inkjets are demonic.
Obviously doesn’t really make sense because if it’s an ad you also know who did it but somehow that’s the first thing that came to mind for me.
> Applied with a handheld tool, the patch stays on the skin for around 10 to 15 minutes
You'd notice.
I’m not saying it’s a real danger (people willing to do that could already do a lot of other stuff) but I wouldn’t be so sure that you couldn’t do it either.
Presumably larger prints will arrive, but you still have the trouble of mapping to a non-euclidean surface. Unless of course you're tattooing Euclid.
The current scheme is not optimally applying friction where it belongs so there's a lot of room for improvement.
The worst I've experienced is on the elbow; it felt like my entire skeleton and nervous system were being jackhammered.
I almost missed that there were 4 colors until the second chart
1. The location of tattoo, some regions of skin are VERY sensitive.
2. The skill of the tattooer. How deep do they go, how fast do they pull, etc...
3. The size of the lines and shading A fine line tattoo feels very different that a block shaded piece. (One needle vs up to 7)
4. The style of the tattoo. Black and gray realism tattoos require the artist to go over an area many times. Going over an already inflamed piece of skin feels way worse than fresh skin.
Hence, you have a pain map of sorts, based on things such as the dermatomes. Utility of the skin also comes to mind, the hands, although 'tough' have a lot of nerves and, allegedly, a job stopper hand tattoo will be extremely painful. Same with the chest, which is 'underbelly' and not 'defended', whereas your shoulder will not have the same 'evolutionary' choices.
Coupled with that is the evolving technology, in the olden days, tattoo machines looked like they were held together with rubber bands, and people swore by these contraptions. Nowadays you have something more like a glorified electric toothbrush, with most artists just preferring the modern tools, that also hurt less. Aftercare has improved too.
Different artists will also impose a different level of pain. Pain also is 'in the eye of the beholder', for your first rodeo you probably had a certain amount of adrenaline going round, for the 'other shoulder' you won't have this 'natural pain killer' to quite the same abundance, so it might hurt more than you expect, rather than less.
Nonetheless, dermatomes, you need to go down that rabbit hole! I never knew of the things until recently.
I also got one not long ago, a round dial about 3 inches across, on my quads a few inches above my knee that was exceedingly painful, an area where the pain charts seem to suggest is not usually painful.
The most painful for me is when when the outline is done and they go back to do the shading/texturing and the skin is already angry. That's a good time to stop if the tattoo is sufficiently large.