Tour tattoos are literary inside your immune system

TOUR TATTOOS ARE LITERARY INSIDE YOUR

IMMUNE SYSTEM

(volume one)

With each very tasteful piece of art, you kickstart a drama with millions of deaths, great sacrifices, and your immune system serving as the white horse to protect you from those harmful decisions. Your skin gets a huge problem to solve whenever you decide to beautify your skin with art. Since it's your largest organ with the most direct contact with the world around you.

Billions of microbes, dirt, insects, and vermin can’t be allowed to get inside you, but the human skin is constantly damaged by just moving through the world. Your body solved this by making your skin a conveyor belt of death. All the skin you see is dead stuff. The living part of your skin cells begins around one-millimeter-deep, in the skin industrial complex. Stem cells constantly clone themselves producing new skin cells that begin a journey from the inside to the outside. Each new generation pushes the older ones further up. As your skin cells mature, they interlock with each other and produce Lamellar bodies, tiny bags that push out fat to create a waterproof coat that closes any gaps between them.

And then, they dry out and kill themselves, merging into inseparable lumps. Research shows that humans shed around 200,000,000 dead skin cells and all the dirt or bacteria stuck to them. Tattooing this part of your skin would be useless as nothing would stick around. Thus, a need to go deeper. Below the conveyor belt of death lies the dermis. It's full of structural tissue and cells. This region and below is where your new tattoo will go.

Half a dozen monoliths the size of skyscrapers slam through the fifty layers of dead cells, deep into the dermis, ripping huge holes into the skin – only to retreat and smash through the tissue again about twice a second. Tens of thousands of cells are violently killed right away, ripped into pieces, or damaged beyond repair.

Even if you did your research and chose a responsible tattoo artist who properly disinfected their tools and your skin, you still only ever get 99.9% of all bacteria, and some of the survivors will make it into your flesh. To put it mildly, your immune system is not happy with you at all. All the death and destruction wake up hundreds of thousands of Macrophages in your dermis, that rush into the open wounds to defend you. Immediately they start killing bacteria, release chemicals that call for reinforcements, and order your blood vessels to open up and make your dermis swell up with fluid. But worse than the hundreds of wounds and a few invaders is the tidal wave of chemicals that floods your tissue. Tattoo ink can be made from hundreds of substances, some may even be toxic or carcinogenic. Most are from heavy metals like lead, nickel, or chromium dissolved in distilled water.

The battlefield is now a wild mix of dead cell parts, a few panicked bacteria, blood and bodily fluids, platelet cells trying to close wounds, more and more fresh immune cells, and the flood of tattoo ink. On the scale of your cells, clumps of ink particles are huge – if you were the size of a cell, they’d range from big dogs to small office buildings. Your immune system has one main job: Identify what is not you and smash it until it's dead.

The Macrophages are desperately trying to do that. Like tiny octopuses, they extend arm-like structures and begin pulling the ink particles inside. Usually, when a Macrophage has eaten an enemy, it covers it in acid to dissolve it. But this doesn’t work with the ink. They try and try but nothing works, the particles don't react in any way. And this is just the particles small enough to be devoured. By now the larger chunks are surrounded by thousands of your structural skin cells and macrophages that are nomming on them, bathing them in acid and attack chemicals and trying to destroy and kill them. But they are not moving even a tiny bit.

Nothing works!!!

Finally, your immune system has to concede. It will not win this fight – so it does the next best thing: NOT LOOSE. Your cells don’t know how dangerous these metals and chemicals are, but they can at least not let them spread around. So they just stay in place. They vacuum up all the particles they can fit into their bodies and surround the larger ones trapping them in the only prison they can build: themselves. Bit by bit, the ink inside thousands of tiny wounds moves inside millions of immune cells that freeze in place forever.

On the outside, you don’t notice any of this. Your new tattoo is fresh and the colors are vibrant. Your skin hurts and is irritated and swollen. But wounds heal, tiny holes close, and dead cells are replaced. Bit by bit, the conveyor belt of death does its job, shedding dead cells ripe in color, and replacing them with fresh and clean ones. Your tattoo becomes a little less vibrant, now the ink is no longer on your skin but inside it. But what you are seeing is millions of your Macrophages, sitting in your dermis, patiently holding the ink in place, protecting your body

from poison. Your immune system is why your tattoo is forever.

But, Nothing is Forever!!!

Over time your Macrophages get old and die and new ones come in to gobble up the ink and keep it in place. But sometimes a tiny bit of ink escapes. Most of it is recaptured and locked in place, but not always in the same place.

You will notice that as your tattoo fades out a bit and turns less sharp and crisp at its edges. Some of the ink escapes the tattoo entirely. It rides fluids flowing from your tissue and spreads around your body, another reason why tattoo ink should ideally not be POISON.