UK-based startup CipherX has developed what it calls the world's first completely painless tattoo, delivering permanent ink into the skin with zero discomfort. The technology replaces the traditional tattoo gun with a disposable plaster covered in hundreds of tiny spikes made from carbon-based tattoo ink combined with a specialised biopolymer.
Once the patch is aligned on the skin, these 'microneedles' are pushed in and begin to break down, depositing a tiny pixel of ink in exactly the right spot. CipherX says the process causes no pain, no blood, and very little damage to the surrounding tissue.
How the patch works
The applicator pushes the microneedles into the skin, where they dissolve to leave behind a single pixel of ink.
The patch stays on the skin for 15 minutes while the microdots deliver the ink. It is then peeled away to reveal a permanent 'microdot' tattoo that slowly darkens over the following 48 hours. Each design currently costs £50.
Tattooing has existed for thousands of years, with some of the earliest examples dating back 5,000 years to the marks found on Otzi the Iceman, a mummy discovered in the Alps. Aside from the invention of the electric tattoo gun in 1891, techniques for putting ink under the skin have remained largely unchanged since.
Why CipherX built it
CipherX says the inspiration for its tattoo applicator came from co-creator Ferdinand Kohle's fear of needles and blood. "Conventional tattooing works well for many people, but it is not accessible to everyone," Kohle told the Daily Mail. "Pain, needle or blood phobia, anxiety, or certain skin conditions can prevent people from participating, even when they are interested in tattoos and self-expression."
"The technology is not intended to replace tattoo artists or conventional tattooing," Kohle said. "They will not be suitable for everyone, and that is ok, but for some people they may offer an option that did not previously exist, including myself."
CipherX currently offers its tattoos in a limited number of designs, such as hearts, stars and smiley faces, that fit inside a 15-millimetre frame. Customers can buy a voucher online, but the tattoo itself can only be applied at a CipherX event, where staff check that customers are over 18, consenting, and sober. The company will not apply the tattoos to the hands, feet, groin, neck, or face.
CipherX says it would eventually like to make the patches available to order online for use at home. The company argues that its sterile, accurately dosed patches make home tattooing safer and easier to reverse than tattoo guns or 'stick and poke' needles already sold online, since ink placed too deep in the skin is harder to fade with laser removal. CipherX's technique avoids the web of scar tissue sometimes left by heavy-handed tattooing, which the company says could make its ink easier to remove.
A path toward needle-free medicine
Despite the eye-catching tattoos, CipherX says giving people an easy way to get inked is not its real goal. The company wants to use its microneedle applicators to deliver vaccines and other medicine through the skin without traditional injections.
"Dissolving microneedles were originally developed for applications such as drug and vaccine delivery," Kohle said. "The same underlying technology platform used for Microdot Tattoos could potentially be adapted for therapeutic delivery, diagnostics, health monitoring and medical marking, for example creating small, consistent skin markers to support patient positioning during radiotherapy."
CipherX has already received funding from Innovate UK, the government's technology innovation agency, to help researchers at the University of Oxford develop a contraceptive hormonal patch. The team is also looking at how its patch could deliver lipid nanoparticles, the tiny packets of medicine used in the mRNA Covid-19 vaccine. Because tattooing is far less regulated than medical products, CipherX says it allows the company to trial its technology in the real world before pursuing clinical trials.
What tattoos say about personality
The news follows research from Michigan State University on how people judge others based on their tattoos. According to the analysis, people with cheerful, colourful tattoos are seen as more agreeable, while those who choose tattoos featuring death imagery are more likely to be rated as unpleasant. People with large, traditional-looking tattoos are more likely to be rated as extroverted.
The world's oldest tattoos
Otzi the Iceman, discovered on 19 December 1991 by German hikers in a melting glacier on the mountainous border between Austria and Italy, was 46 when he died during the Copper Age. Experts found a total of 61 tattoos on his body using different wavelengths of light to pick them out on the mummy's darkened skin, and in December 2015 they were confirmed as the world's oldest.
Albert Zink, head of the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman in Bolzano, Italy, told LiveScience that the ancient tattoo artist who applied them made incisions into the skin and then put in charcoal mixed with herbs. The tattoos, mostly found on Otzi's lower back and legs between the knee and foot, may have been a way to relieve chronic pain or injuries, though researchers cannot be certain of their purpose.
In March 2018, figurative tattoos were discovered on 5,000-year-old Egyptian mummies at the British Museum, which experts said were the world's earliest figurative tattoos. They depict a wild bull and a Barbary sheep on the upper arm of a male mummy, and S-shaped motifs on the upper arm and shoulder of a female mummy, pushing back the dating of imagery-based tattoos by 1,000 years.
