Before You Get a Tattoo...
By Teresa Ambord
If you are a teenager considering a tattoo, you need to know what to look for. First, if you’re a minor, do you know if your state requires you to have parental permission?
Talk to your friends who have tattoos or body piercings… but stick to friends you trust to give you the truth. Ask them about the pain and the healing time. How much did they pay? Most importantly, would they do it again?
If they were happy with the experience, ask them where they had the procedure done. Then check out the place, and several others before you decide.
Whatever you do, don’t try piercing or tattooing yourself, and don’t let a friend do it. The health risks are too great. Don’t allow anyone to pressure you. This is your decision and yours alone, assuming of course that you have parental permission where it is required.
No matter how cool it seems, you should never risk your health. Don’t allow a piercer or tattoo artist to touch you until you’ve checked out their operation. If possible, watch them pierce or tattoo somebody else. Here are things to look for:
- Is the work area clean and sanitized? Professionals will have an autoclave, or sterilization machine, that they use to disinfect equipment between customers.
- What about the lighting? This is a delicate procedure…don’t trust it to someone who doesn’t bother to have adequate light.
If you get a chance to watch a tattoo artist at work, watch for some warning signs:
- Does the artist insert the needle directly into the bottle?
- Does the artist pour leftover ink back into the bottle? If he/she does either of these, find another artist. These practices spread infection.
- Needles need to be sterilized before use and discarded after use into a biohazard container.
Before the procedure begins, the artist should wash his hands and then put on latex gloves which should remain on until done. If the artist leaves the procedure to do something else, like answer the phone, he has contaminated the gloves and needs to wash up again and use new gloves. Watch carefully… if these basic, common sense rules are not followed, you’re in the wrong place.
There are typically two ways for a tattoo to be applied, either by a “professional” or an amateur. Either way carries the risk of blood borne disease.
Professional Tattoo Artists
Keep in mind, even a “professional” tattoo is usually applied by an unlicensed artist, and the dye is not FDA approved. Here’s how they do it:
Tattoo artists use an electrically powered, vertical vibrating machine that injects the dye into the second layer of skin. The instrument injects pigment at a rate of 50 to 3,000 times per minute, at an under-skin depth of 1/64 to 1/16 of an inch. First a single needle creates an outline of the tattoo. Then the tattoo is filled in with a needle bar that has five to seven needles.
Amateurs
Most teens do their own tattoos, or get friends to do them. Obviously, that’s the more dangerous method, usually not sterile, and probably done with the wrong implements. Amateurs have been known to inject pigment with regular needles, straight pins, or pencils or writing pens. If this bothers you, the news gets worse. Amateurs may use a variety of substances for pigment, including mascara, charcoal, India ink and even dirt.