TATTOO OR THE PERFECT BLOOD SMEAR

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       Once considered only associated with sailor men’s,  tattoos are symbols that are carved in the canvas of our body. It can be related to fashion, status, belonging to a particular religion, or can be associated with criminals, slaves, and spices. It is a proven fact that tattooed individuals stand out in a group as a symbol of uniqueness compared to their nontattooed counterparts.

A SHORT HISTORY OF TATTOO

             The practice of tattooing dates 1.5 million years ago.  Egyptian women and Libyan men having tattoos on their skin have been recorded using carbon dating adding to the archeological evidence of tattooing in ancient and historic society. They represented signs of nobility,  bravery,  a way to wash off the sins and other wrongdoings through the pain they get by cutting or puncturing their skin.

TATTOO AS CAREER

       Artistic skills like sketching, drawing and a passion for tattooing are the basics to take up this career. Because there is no technical/degree course offered in colleges for tattooing, one has to master it by assisting an established tattoo artist. The outlook of the tattoo world has changed itself, now it is considered an artistic field and has a fine art position. With more and more public figures showing up their tattoos the trend for getting a tattoo is being increased, which is a great boom to this industry.

WORDS FROM  AN INTERNATIONAL TATTOO ARTIST

 

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Sitting in my busy tattoo studio I was looking at how the blood which oozed out made beautiful pictures in people’s bodies when I prick with the tattoo gun. This was a career once I hesitated to take but now it is a growing business and more young people are taking up creative fields. Even though I won’t get paid like Carolyn Elaine and Rob Kelly ie $1000-1500 per hour I get a top-of-the-world feeling from the satisfying words I get from my clients and working hard to carry my grandmothers legacy worldwide.

THE OLDEST TATTOO ARTIST

         Being the granddaughter of Whang-od Oggy, a Filipina tattoo artist of the Kalinga ethnic group I learned the art of drawing with indelible ink from her. she uses pen ink, black powders from the incomplete burning of organic matters, and some natural ingredients other than azo chemicals, antimony, arsenic, beryllium which are used nowadays.

LEARNING THE ART OF TATTOOING 

            My grandmother uses a rectangular piece of bronze needles of different sizes which are folded inward into a wooden handle and chiels made of bone then dip them into soot. I help her in arranging her tools and in making the ink. She is 104 years old, even at this age, she is passionate about her work that is why people from different parts of the world come here, climbing the hills to get tattooed by her.

IT IS A SERIOUS JOB

    Make sure that the tattoo needle is disposed of correctly and the non-disposable machinery parts are sterilized after every use to avoid skin infection and other blood-borne diseases like Human Immunodeficiency Virus(HIV), Hepatitis B and C, and Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus(MRSA) which are fatal pathogens. I  do suggest carrying out a sample test on the client before using dyes because allergic reactions may occur from the indelible ink.

REMOVING MEMORIES

My concern is to keep my clients comfortable as possible while I pick on their skin, generally a painful experience. Even if different people have different levels of pain I get wondered by the increasing number of people that come up to erase the existing tattoo for getting a new one.

Now we use the Q-switching technique, which uses light with high gigawatt power. Laser tattoo removal can be done and the pigment gets cleared by the immune system of our body, a typical human behavior to pretend that everything is fine but those memories that are tattooed in the brain cannot be erased.