Ink-jet medicine will take us to painless tattoos
Posted on November 5, 2007 in National News Notes by DM
Here’s an interesting tidbit from the customer newsletter of a local commercial print shop:
“Using ink-jet printing technology, Hewlett-Packard has developed a patch covered with microneedles that painlessly penetrates the skin. Arrayed above the microneedles are wells that contain one or more drugs, along with a miniature “firing” device. The technology… is expected to be commercially available in three or four years.”
A quick Google search turned up several stories about the technology from earlier this fall, including this one from PC World.
“While the microneedles penetrate the skin, the patch is painless to use. ‘The microneedles are designed in such a way that they don’t penetrate the skin deep enough to impact the nerves,’ (HP associate director of Intellectual Property Licensing Lim Eng Hann said).”
My advice? Get that tattoo now while it still hurts to get one. While it’s undeniable that more and more people are getting tattoos, I’m betting that one of the main things keeping them from being totally mainstream is that there’s a certain amount of pain involved in getting one. Meaning, if they didn’t hurt, there’d be nothing much that was rebellious or bad-*ss about them. Once this painless “ink-jet printing technology” gets adapted to tattoo equipment, tats are finished as a statement of rebellion.
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Can you imagine #### of boosters of sports teams wearing their tattooed logos on their arms or backs with the proposed technology? That could supplant or even replace the classic tradition of people in the bleachers holding up signs on cue which together form a message or a picture.
And people might sell parts of their skin to advertisers as a way of making money. That is either crass, freedom of speech, the American way or a combination of all of the above, depending on how people view it.