Why do some tattoos (especially text) look ‘blurry’ and smudged while others looks super clean?
In: 5
Tattoos age over time. Bright and sharp lined tattoos are usually fresh, and blurry and faded ones are usually years old. Basically the ink in your skin is mostly held in place by glomming on of immune cells, but that area is still alive and ink gets shifted as old cells die and new cells are created. Some regions like the hands with thinner skin lots of cell division are particularly prone to this kind of fading.
Better technique and certain styles can mitigate the effect of aging, but can’t eliminate it.
There’s also a separate thing where the artist is just not so good, or maybe just working on a particularly difficult area of skin, and doesn’t hold sharp lines or goes too deep and ink gets put into the much less stable layers of skin and blows out.
Tattoos inject ink under the skin, which the immune system is not happy about. Some immune cells eat the ink and attempt to break it down, this doesn’t work because the ink isn’t alive, so the immune cell dies from the ink.
When the immune cell is found dead another immune cell comes along to clean it up for the good of the body and then dies from the ink it consumes. This repeats until they are able to finally break the ink down many many many years later. While they do this, the ink is slowly shifted out from where it was and often changes colour causing the blurring and fading to occur.
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