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The Freaky, Bioelectric Future of Tattoos
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America loves tattoos. From tribal designs to tramp stamps, this country can't get enough ink. Last month, a Pew study showed
that tattoos grace the bodies of nearly 40 percent of Americans under
40, a massive number of customers in a $1.65 billion industry. Like any
industry, however, the tattoo industry must innovate.
But
what on Earth does tattoo innovation look like? What are we going to do
next? Make them light up, or monitor our health, or turn into
computers? What is the future of tattoos?
Everyone
from neurologists to biohackers is reinventing the very idea of the
tattoo. With the right technology, tattoos can do a lot more than just
look beautiful or badass. They can become digital devices as useful and
complex as the smartphone that bounces around in your pocket. It sounds
wildly futuristic, but the technology already exists.
History
Before
wading too deep into the future of tattoos, it's useful to understand
where the custom comes from—and it sort of comes from everywhere.
Ancient cultures, from Africa to the British Isles to the South Pacific,
practiced some form of tattooing, often for ceremonial purposes. Even
cavemen did it.
One
of the earliest known examples of tattooing was found on Ötzi, a
Neolithic man mummified in the Swiss Alps and uncovered in 1991. Ötzi's
well preserved skin shows signs of tattooing
in several places, including dots on his back, knee, and ankle,
locations that suggests they were given as a form of healing, a more
artistic form of acupuncture. Ancient Egyptians also used tattoos as a
form of medicine, but the body art took on a more cultural role
elsewhere.
Tattoos
took on a new meaning when the British began exploring the world. The
name "tattoo" can actually be traced back to a series of journeys
through the Pacific that Captain James Cook made in the late 18th
century. There, his sailors learned of the Tahitian art of tatau,
a ritual involving ink and needle, and many returned to England with
their own tattoos. Over the years, tattoos became associated with
sailors, who reintroduced the art to Europe and, eventually, to the
United States.
High Tech Ink
Modern
tattooing has evolved beyond the crude methods of the British Navy—but
not by much. In 1891, New York tattooist Samuel O'Reilly patented the
modern two-coil electromagnetic tattoo needle, borrowing the design from
Thomas Edison's electric pen.
The basic concept behind the device is still what powers tattoo
machines today. What's improved dramatically, however, is the ink that
goes along with it.
Traditionally,
tattoo ink was made of anything from soot to metal salts. As health
concerns cropped up around the use of potentially toxic substances as a
pigment, natural vegetable-based organic pigments have come into
fashion. That doesn't mean that chemicals are out of the picture. It's
possible, for instance, to use ferromagnetic ink in tattoos,
ink that responds to electromagnetic fields. A couple years ago, Nokia
patented a technology that would enable the ink in a tattoo to interact
with a device through magnetism. With this technology, your phone could
ring and you could literally feel it through your tattoo.
Then
there are the more visual innovations. The 90s rave scene helped spawn
an ongoing trend of using ultraviolet and glow-in-the-dark ink for
tattoos, for example. Often invisible in the daytime, these designs
light up under blacklights in the club. Think of them as Tron tats. It's
worth noting, however, that the health risks of these
radioactive-looking tattoos remain unclear.
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The
other major innovation in tattoo ink relates to permanence. You see,
sometimes people get permanent tattoos—then later regret them and want
them removed.
While
it's possible to remove permanent tattoos, the process is painful and
leaves scars. Or at least it did before scientists from Harvard, Brown,
and Duke teamed up to create Freedom-2 ink,
a removable ink that stored the dye in microscopic capsules that can be
easily eradicated with a laser. So it's entirely possible in the
21st-century to get a tattoo made of vegetables that glows and can be
removed almost painlessly. Progress!
Tattoos as Gadgets
The
future of tattoos doesn't really lie in the ink, on the other hand. A
new era of tattoos essentially reinvents the very definition of the art
by pushing the boundaries of technology. Think of putting ink in your
skin as analog, and you can start to get an idea of what a digital
tattoo can do. Some will amaze you.
In the future, tattoos will do things.
If you imagine a sort of post-ink tattoo, you can comprehend the
emerging field of bio-hacking. This term refers to a practice that's
part body modification, part computer hacking, and all kinds of crazy.
Artist Anthony Antonellis is one of the true pioneers of the movement.
Last year, he stunned the geek world when he implanted an RFID chip in his hand
that could store and transmit one kilobyte of information through a
tiny antennae. He started out with a simple animated gif (below).
It
makes you think: Is that rotating rainbow the tattoo? Or is it the RFID
chip Antonellis is carrying around in his hand? Or both?
The animated gif tattoo brings to mind Rich Lee, a 30-something salesman from Utah who implanted sound-transmitting magnets in his ears.
The magnets are powered by a coil apparatus that includes a little
amplifier and battery pack and plugs into Lee's Walkman (or whatever).
The coil creates an electromagnetic field that vibrates the magnets in
his ears and creates sound. Lee says the quality is akin to a cheap pair
of earbuds—a pair of earbuds he wears at all times. It sounds like a
pretty crazy rig, but it sure is a conversation starter at parties.
Gadgets as Tattoos
Now,
I know what you're thinking: Putting magnets in your ears or a chip in
your hand doesn't really seem like a tattoo. After all, aren't you
supposed to see tattoos? Well, remember that the future of
tattoos is most likely going to be a post-ink enterprise. In some cases,
ink will become ephemeral, like the data for an animated gif floating
in the ether. In other cases, though, the ink is actually a gadget
itself.
Take
LED tattoos. Instead of ink injection, this form of tattooing involves
implanting LED displays under the skin. More specifically, LED tattoos are made up of silicon electronics
less than 250 nanometers thick, built onto water soluble, biocompatible
silk substrates. When injected with saline, the silk substrates conform
to fit the surrounding tissue and eventually dissolve completely,
leaving only the silicon circuitry. The body won't reject the
electronics which can be used to power LEDs that act as photonic
tattoos.
This is not science fiction. The University of Pennsylvania's Brian Litt, a neurologist and bioengineer, is perfecting a form of this technology
that could be used to build futuristic medical devices—say, a tattoo
that gives diabetics information about their blood sugar level. (The
idea that futuristic tattoos might serve a medical purpose sure brings
us full circle back to Ötzi and his arthritis treatment, huh?)
However,
the technology could also power next generation body art, like animated
tattoos that make you look like a mutant. Philips imagined what that
might look like in this (rather sexual) video from 2008:
Until Then...
The
tattoos of the future inevitably have to work with the technology of
today. We're probably a few years away from the Philips fantasy up
there, but creative tattooists are figuring out ways around the
limitations. Karl Marc, a tattoo artist from Paris, says he created the world's first animated tattoo
that makes use of a QR code and a smartphone. The code basically
activates software on the phone that makes the tattoo move when seen
through the phone's camera. It's legitimately cool.
Then
there's the temporary approach. Things get very tricky when you start
putting foreign bodies—ink, silicon, or otherwise—into the body. But if
you're just putting the electronics on top of the skin, well, that
changes the game.
Materials scientist John Rogers is doing some pretty incredible work with flexible electronics that stick to your skin like a temporary tattoo.
These so-called "epidural electronics" can do anything from monitoring
your body's vital signs to alerting you when you're starting to get a
sunburn. Rogers and his company MC10 are currently trying to figure out
ways to get the electronics to communicate with other devices like
smartphones so that they can start building apps.
Google isn't far behind them. This year, the company's Motorola division patented a device that looks like a neck tattoo.
Like Rogers' technology, this device is attached directly to the skin
where it picks up vibrations from the vocal cords creating a microphone
with virtually no interference. It's hard to tell if they filed the
patent because they wanted to win some attention or because they
actually want to build and sell the thing. But it's still cool to
imagine.
Along
those lines, don't expect to be able to walk into your local parlor and
ask for a digital tattoo any time too soon. While the technology exists
to make some pretty incredible stuff, it's still very specialized and
incredibly expensive. It'll take some time for the demand to increase
enough so that industry offers up the supply. Because remember: body art
is a business. And businesses need incentives to change course.
Images via Shutterstock / Wikipedia / AP / MIT
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