➴❤︎ The Dangers of Tattoos...

If you have a tattoo, your body doesn’t simply accept the ink and forget about it. The immune system recognizes the pigment as foreign material and sends specialized immune cells called macrophages to the area. These cells engulf the pigment, but because many tattoo pigments are too chemically stable to break down, the ink can remain trapped inside them.

When a macrophage eventually dies, the pigment can be released and taken up by a new macrophage. So the pigment can essentially be passed from cell to cell in a microscopic relay that may continue for years. Some tattoo pigments can also travel through the lymphatic system and accumulate in the lymph nodes.

This is one reason tattoo removal is such a process. Lasers break the pigment into much smaller particles, allowing the body's immune and lymphatic systems to gradually clear them.

But there is another part that really makes me think. Your skin is an organ. A tattoo deliberately punctures and injures that organ thousands of times while permanently depositing foreign pigment into it. The body then has to repair, contain, and compensate for that injury.

I came to believe tattoos damage the body.. the immune system will always have to compensate to some degree because the tissue has been permanently altered.

Think about what happens with a serious burn. With second- or third-degree burns, the skin is severely injured, and the body immediately goes into repair mode—fighting the damage, rebuilding tissue, and forming scar tissue. Those scars can remain for life.

A tattoo obviously isn't the same thing as a second- or third-degree burn, but the comparison makes you think about what we're intentionally doing to an organ. We are creating thousands of tiny wounds and deliberately leaving foreign material behind, knowing the body will have to deal with it for the rest of our lives.

After learning more about how the body constantly adapts, compensates, repairs, and tries to maintain balance, I honestly don't understand why people would intentionally do this to themselves. I'm not trying to judge anyone—I just think people should understand what is actually happening beneath the skin before they make a permanent decision.