Thinking of inking? Read this first

Tattoo inks can have more properties than the ability to immortalise trite mottos and naked ladies.

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Thanks to a longstanding aversion to needles, pain and commitment, your Back Page correspondent has managed to maintain his ageing body as a tattoo-free zone.

While remaining agnostic as to the aesthetic or otherwise qualities of the omnipresent fashion for inky emblems, doubts have also lingered over the long-term health impacts of the practice.

And we are not alone.

Researchers based at the State University of New York have been putting in the hard yards investigating the toxic potential of the chemicals used in tattoo inks, and the findings are a tad disturbing.    

Warnings over the dangers posed by some tattoo inks are not new, but the evidence of the possible harms caused is growing – as is demonstrated in a study paper the New York team, known as the Swierk Group, presented last month at the American Chemical Society’s annual conference.

“Every time we looked at one of the inks, we found something that gave me pause,” the study’s principal investigator, chemistry expert John Swierk, said in a media release.

One of the key problems is finding out which chemicals are in which tattoo inks. For example, the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre published a report back in 2016 that found some pigments, many of which were imported into Europe, contained nasties such as arsenic, lead, and bacteria.

But despite this, there is often no mention of these substances on the ingredients lists of the inks and little way that tattoo artists, or their unwitting clients, can make an informed decision.

Tattoo ink is usually comprised of pigments and a carrier solution, which is used to make the ink colours more soluble and transfer them better to the middle layer of skin.

Using multiple high-tech methods, from electron microscopy to nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, Swierk and his team made some troubling findings about the mixtures.

For example, ethanol was found in one ink that did not have it listed in its ingredients, and many of the others contained something called azo, a common pigment type. Although azo is not unsafe on its own, the Swierk team research notes that over time it can degrade into a different nitrogen-based compound that’s potentially carcinogenic.

Also of concern, of the 16 pigments the researchers studied, roughly half had particles small enough to “get through the cell membrane and potentially cause harm”.

More of the group’s findings can be explored in detail on its website, What’s in My Ink?.

It may make you think twice before deciding that your team’s grand final victory really does need to become a permanent dermatological record.

If you see something that’s worth recording in printers’ ink or bits and bytes, penny@medicalrepublic.com.au is the artist that can make it happen.