Serious question. If a tattoo is ink that gets put into your skin, won’t your tattoo fade away because your body naturally shreds old skin?
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Nah, the new skin basically eats the ink as it’s getting made, so it’s constantly getting re integrated. That’s why tattoos spread/turn fuzzy even with no skin stretching, bc the ink moves from cell to cell
You only shed the outer most layer skin. Tattoo ink get put in deeper than that.
Also Tattoo ink does fade over time, most people just theird refreshed from time to time
No. Only your outer layer of skin, your epidermis, sheds dead skin cells. Tattoo ink is deposited in your dermis, which is below the epidermis. Cells in the dermis do not shed. Tattoos do fade eventually given enough time, but for other reasons.
What occurs is that the innate immune system, macrophages specifically, recognises the ink as an invader and they engulf the ink, tiny drop by tiny drop, then just hang about, their job done, until they die. When they die (apoptosis) they themselves are tidied up by the immune system and the cycle continues with generation after generation of macrophage holding the ink in place, but every time that happens a little ink is lost causing the edges of the tattoo to become fuzzy and fade over time.
Another fun fact to add to the other answers — it does fade almost immediately (first few weeks) for the exact reason you mention.
Most of it stays because it’s deposited into the layer beneath the layer that sheds, but a brand new tattoo is at its sharpest and brightest because to get to the target deeper layer, they have to go through the outermost layer first.
But over the course of the first few weeks, you shed the dead outer layer as you heal, and are eventually left with the mostly final result. A tattoo that’s slightly less sharp than the original and a sort of distinct look due to it being viewed through a window of healed, fresh, uninked skin.
That’s also why temporary tattoos look fake. They’re on top of the skin instead of being viewed through a thin layer of uninked skin.
It’s also why if and when you get your first tattoo, you’ll probably freak out when you start washing it and chunks of your tattoo look like they’re falling off and going down the shower drain. Your tattoo is safe, but that top layer that got inked on the way to the deeper target layer is dying and being refreshed, the way your skin does all the time.
So the way it works is that your skin has several layers to it. In short the outer layer, the middle layer, and the inner layer. They’re all made up of the same stuff and have a ton of layers individually but it’s more helpful to think of it in those 3 bands. Tattoos are only really put into the middle layer, whereas the outer layer is the one that gets shed.
But tattoos actually do fade, at first it’s because there’s some ink in the outer layers and that gets shed in a few weeks as the skin heals because a tattoo is basically just a wound you stuck bits of ink in. After that it’s largely sun damage and your white blood cells recognising that something in your body isn’t actually supposed to be there and are slowly eating away at it.
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