This is a great and comprehensive article on tattooing and the health consequences. Also, there was a study where tattoo inks contained things not in the ingredient list, so you don’t really know what you’re putting into your body. And your skin is your largest organ.
They now disfigure 32% of American adults, up from a 3–5% baseline in the 1960s–70s; among millennials, the rate hits 46%.
By Robert Yoho, MD
Summary
• Tattoo ink migrates out of the skin. Up to 32% of injected pigment reaches the lymph nodes within 6 weeks, triggers chronic inflammation, and—in two independent European studies—a 21–62% higher risk of lymphoma.
• The inks are a chemical soup: carbon black, azo dyes, titanium dioxide, and heavy metals, including arsenic, lead, cadmium, cobalt, chromium, and nickel. Mercury still appears in some red inks globally, though it has largely been replaced by azo compounds that degrade under ultraviolet (UV) light into carcinogenic aromatic amines.
• Surgeons routinely find swollen, blue-stained lymph glands in tattooed patients; the glands are not indifferent to the pigment—they are inflamed, enlarged, and potentially pre-malignant.
• Heavy or full-body tattooing links to borderline personality disorder (BPD), antisocial personality disorder, substance abuse, and elevated risk-taking behavior. The more body surface covered, the more severe the psychopathology traits the research documents.
• Laser tattoo removal is expensive, painful, typically requires 7–15 sessions, and is not reliably complete; it shatters ink particles into the bloodstream and lymphatics, where they disperse further into the body and degrade into toxic fragments.
• No credible evidence shows a deliberate globalist campaign to promote tattooing, though the media normalization of disfiguring body art fits the broader pattern of cultural degradation I have documented elsewhere.
The ink and the ages: a brief history
Tattooing is not a modern invention dreamed up by record-store employees. The oldest confirmed human tattoos belong to Ötzi the Iceman, a Copper Age man whose frozen corpse was pulled from the Alps in 1991. He died around 3300 BC. His 61 tattoos were simple carbon-dot patterns placed over arthritic joints; researchers believe they were therapeutic rather than decorative. Tattooed Egyptian mummies date to at least 2000 BC. The Maori of New Zealand developed ta moko, the facial tattoo that encoded genealogy and social rank. Polynesian societies—the word “tattoo” derives from the Tahitian “tatau”—used body marking for spiritual protection and identity. The Japanese tradition of irezumi, with its elaborate pictorial designs covering the torso, arms, and thighs, flourished among craftsmen and organized crime alike for centuries.
In the West, sailors and soldiers brought tattoos home from the Pacific in the late 1700s and 1800s. The practice spread slowly through maritime culture, military service, and prison populations. In the United States from the Civil War through roughly 1960, tattoos carried a clear demographic signal: military service, merchant shipping, or marginal social status. Surveys from that era put the prevalence among the general American adult population at somewhere between 2% and 6%.
Then came the 1960s counterculture, followed by the biker subculture of the 1970s, the punk movement of the late 1970s and 1980s, and the mainstream crossover of the 1990s. Celebrity display accelerated adoption. By 2003, roughly 16% of American adults reported at least one tattoo. By 2023, Pew Research Center put that number at 32%—about 82 million people. Millennials, born between 1981 and 1996, reached 46% tattooed prevalence by 2022. In Italy and Sweden the proportions now exceed 47%.
What tattooing does to the body
The process is straightforward and brutal. An electric machine drives a cluster of needles into the skin 50 to 3,000 times per minute, puncturing the outer layer (the epidermis) and depositing ink droplets into the dermis roughly 1 to 2 millimeters below the surface. The dermis contains blood vessels, lymphatics, nerves, and the collagen matrix that gives skin its structure. Ink deposited here is too large for individual cells to carry away—that’s why the tattoo persists. But “persists” does not mean “stays put.” A significant fraction of the pigment migrates almost immediately.
Research shows that around 32% of the injected pigment reaches the regional lymph nodes within 6 weeks of application. Both black and colored pigments travel through the lymphatic channels. Heavy metal particles from needle wear also make the trip. Surgeons have described this for decades: when they dissect the armpit, groin, or neck of a tattooed patient, they find swollen, discolored, and pigmented lymph nodes. The glands are not neutral storage tanks. They are immunologically active tissues under sustained assault.
The immune system perceives tattoo ink as a foreign substance because it is. Macrophages (the scavenger cells of the immune system) engulf the pigment particles. Then they die and release the particles again. A 2025 study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) demonstrated this cycle in mice tattooed with black, red, and green inks: the ink accumulated inside macrophages in the lymph nodes, the macrophages died, and the glands entered a state of chronic, low-grade inflammation. The same study found that tattoo ink at the injection site altered immune responses to COVID-19 and influenza vaccines—a finding with obvious implications for the jabbed population.
Ink does not stop at the lymph nodes. Studies have confirmed that pigment particles enter the bloodstream and distribute to distant organs, including the liver, spleen, and kidneys. A 2017 synchrotron-based study from Germany mapped tattoo pigment in human tissue and confirmed systemic distribution beyond the local lymph nodes. The metal components—cobalt, nickel, chromium, arsenic—circulate as free ions once the ink particle breaks down, giving these elements access to every organ system. This is not a theoretical risk. It is documented chemistry.
What is in the ink
Tattoo ink manufacturers face no requirement from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to disclose their formulas, conduct safety trials, or seek approval before selling. The FDA has issued draft guidance on contaminated inks, but formal pre-market oversight does not exist. The European Union moved faster: harmonized restrictions under the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) regulation took effect in 2022, but a 2024 analysis of 41 commercially available EU inks still found exceedances of safety limits for nickel (24 of 41 samples), arsenic (20 samples), hexavalent chromium (16 samples), copper (10 samples), antimony (8 samples), cobalt (6 samples), and lead (5 samples). Mercury was not detected in that study.
The principal colorants break down like this. Black inks rely on carbon black, a soot product created by incomplete combustion. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classifies carbon black as a possible human carcinogen (Group 2B). The incomplete combustion that produces carbon black also generates polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) as byproducts—compounds with well-documented carcinogenic properties. White inks use titanium dioxide, a mildly abrasive compound that, as it wears down, dislodges microscopic nickel and chromium fragments from the tattooing needle and carries them into the skin. Colored inks draw on the full periodic table of hazard: cobalt for blue, chromium salts for green, cadmium compounds for yellow and orange, and—for red—a complicated history.
Mercury sulfide (cinnabar or vermilion) was the traditional basis for red tattoo ink for most of the twentieth century. Mercury is not ambiguously toxic. It damages the brain, kidneys, nerves, and muscles. Its fat-solubility allows it to cross the blood-brain barrier and accumulate in neural tissue. The tattooing community discovered early that red tattoos caused more allergic reactions, more granuloma formation, and more delayed sensitivity reactions than any other color—almost certainly because of the mercury. The industry has largely replaced mercury sulfide in Western markets with azo dyes, quinacridone, and iron oxide. But “largely” is not “entirely.” Mercury-based red inks persist in some markets, and azo dyes present their own problem.
Under UV light—such as sunlight, tanning beds, or laser removal—azo dyes degrade into primary aromatic amines (PAAs). Many PAAs are classified as carcinogens. A tattooed person’s skin is exposed to sunlight every day for decades. Laser tattoo removal, which shatters pigment into smaller fragments, accelerates this degradation and generates toxic breakdown products—sometimes more dangerous than the original ink.
Other ink constituents include preservatives such as formaldehyde and aldehydes (found in some carrier analyses), ethylene glycol (antifreeze), glycerin, propylene glycol, and ethanol. Contaminated ink batches have caused outbreaks of infection. In 2012, a multi-state outbreak reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association traced Mycobacterium chelonae infections in New York, Washington, Iowa, and Colorado to contaminated premixed gray wash ink. The pathogen requires months of antibiotics and, in severe cases, surgery.
The lymph node problem
Those of us who spent thirty years as surgeons know exactly what blue-stained lymph nodes look like. They look wrong. They look sick. A normal lymph node is a pale, bean-shaped structure roughly the size of a pea. A tattoo-associated lymph node is enlarged, darkly pigmented, and to the examining pathologist superficially resembles a node loaded with melanoma metastases. Surgeons have sent these nodes to pathology for decades with a working diagnosis of cancer, only to find ink.
What the medical establishment is only now grudgingly acknowledging is that this is not benign. A 2024 population-based case-control study from Lund University in Sweden, published in eClinicalMedicine, followed 11,905 Swedes and found that tattooed individuals had a 21% higher risk of malignant lymphoma overall, with the strongest associations for diffuse large B-cell lymphoma and follicular lymphoma. A separate Danish twin study published in BMC Public Health in early 2025, using 2,367 twins, found a 62% higher hazard of skin cancer and a nearly 3-fold higher hazard of lymphoma in people with tattoos larger than the palm of a hand. Identical twins share genetics; discordant results between an inked twin and an uninked one isolate the tattoo as the variable.
The November 2025 PNAS study provided the mechanistic link: tattoo ink parks inside lymph node macrophages, the macrophages die in an inflammatory cascade, and the dying cells trigger long-term immune disruption. The same immune disruption altered vaccine responses in tattooed mice. Whether chronically inflamed, pigment-loaded lymph nodes become malignant is a question that will take another decade of follow-up to answer definitively. But the trend is not encouraging, and body surface covered matters: more ink means more pigment in the nodes and a higher apparent risk.
There is also an imaging problem. Mammography, sentinel node mapping for breast cancer surgery, and other staging procedures use dyes injected into tissue to track lymphatic drainage. Tattoo pigment already in the nodes interferes with interpretation and with the blue dye used to identify sentinel nodes. Tattooed patients have received unnecessary additional surgery and additional biopsies because their pigmented nodes mimicked cancer. This is not theoretical; it has been documented in the surgical literature for years.
Other health hazards
Infections
The piercing of the skin barrier at high frequency in a non-sterile environment is a setup for infection. The most dangerous scenario is contaminated ink, because ink is delivered directly into the dermis, bypassing all surface defenses. Mycobacterium chelonae, the nontuberculous mycobacterium behind the 2012 outbreak, produces a rash or raised red bumps within weeks, is frequently misdiagnosed as an allergic reaction, and requires surgery in severe cases. Outbreaks of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) linked to tattoo studios have been documented in Ohio, Kentucky, and Vermont. Hepatitis B was, for decades, the most commonly documented bloodborne infection from tattooing; hepatitis C transmission has also been reported.
The machine itself cannot be autoclaved; its motor and housing are wrapped in plastic between clients at reputable studios. Needles must be single-use. Ink must come from separate disposable containers for each client. In the real world, standards vary. Forty states and Washington, D.C. require autoclave monitoring; Missouri and Ohio require weekly testing. Ten states have minimal or no specific regulations for tattoo studios. A 10% rate of skin complications immediately post-tattooing was reported in a New York survey.
Allergic reactions and granulomas
Red ink causes allergic reactions far more often than any other color. The reactions range from an itchy rash at the tattoo site to full systemic allergic responses. Granulomas—small nodules of inflammatory tissue—form around ink particles, especially red and flesh-toned pigments. They appear years or decades after the original tattoo. Tattoo ink contaminated with metal allergens (nickel, chromium, cobalt) can cause sensitization that later manifests as contact dermatitis when the person encounters the same metals in jewelry, watchbands, or surgical implants.
MRI interference
Tattoos containing metallic pigments heat up during magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). First- and second-degree burns at tattoo sites during MRI have been reported. The iron-oxide pigments used in some flesh-tone and cosmetic tattoo inks are paramagnetic, meaning they respond to the MRI magnet. Radiologists and MRI technologists are supposed to ask about tattoos before scanning, but this precaution is inconsistently applied.
Tattoo removal: the exit ramp is worse than you think
About 24% of tattooed Americans regret at least one tattoo. Among those who seek removal, the most commonly cited reason—in 48% of cases in one UK series—is the desire to improve self-esteem. So the people most likely to regret their tattoos are the same people whose self-image problems drove them to get tattooed in the first place. The tattoo industry profits twice: once to put the ink in, once to take it out. The removal market is now a $4.5 billion industry.
Laser removal is the gold standard. The technology uses selective photothermolysis: a laser pulse of a specific wavelength is absorbed preferentially by a specific pigment color, shattering it into fragments small enough for the immune system to carry away. Quality-switched (QS) nanosecond and picosecond lasers—the Nd: YAG (neodymium-doped yttrium aluminum garnet) at 1064 nm is the workhorse for black ink—have improved considerably over the past decade. But “improved” does not mean “reliable.”
The numbers: most tattoos require 7 to 15 sessions for acceptable removal, with 6 to 8 weeks between sessions to allow healing. That is a minimum of 12 to 24 months of treatment. A single session at a reputable clinic runs $200 to $500, depending on tattoo size. For a moderately sized piece, complete removal costs $2,000 to $7,500 and takes the better part of 2 years. And complete removal is not guaranteed. Dark blue and black inks respond best. Green, red, and yellow are the hardest to clear. Flesh-toned and cosmetic tattoo inks pose a particular trap: the pigment oxidizes when hit with a laser, turning black, and becomes resistant to further laser treatment. That “permanent eyebrow” or “permanent lip liner” can become a permanent black smear.
One Italian study reported 74% complete clearance with Q-switched laser, with 91% patient satisfaction. That sounds good until you realize that 26% of patients in a best-case academic series did not achieve complete removal. In routine clinical practice, the results are worse. “Ghost images”—faded outlines of the original design permanently etched into the skin—are a common outcome, particularly with multicolored tattoos or those applied by unskilled artists who deposited ink at irregular depths.
Each session is painful. The sensation is commonly described as a rubber band repeatedly snapping against sunburned skin, for minutes to tens of minutes, depending on the tattoo’s size. Topical anesthetic creams reduce, but do not eliminate, pain. Acute complications after each session include blistering, crusting, pinpoint bleeding, redness, and swelling. Delayed complications include hypopigmentation (permanent lightening of the skin in the treated area), hyperpigmentation (permanent darkening), hypertrophic scarring, and allergic reactions to the fragmented pigment, including, in rare cases, anaphylaxis. Smokers have significantly worse removal outcomes; smoking impairs the immune clearance that does the work of carrying fragmented pigment away.
What laser removal does to the toxins
Here is the part that the removal industry does not advertise: laser treatment does not eliminate the toxic chemical burden of a tattoo. It redistributes it.
The laser shatters ink particles into sub-micron fragments. These fragments are smaller and more mobile than the original particles, which means they disperse more efficiently through the lymphatic system and bloodstream. The immune system carries them to the lymph nodes—the same nodes already inflamed by the original tattoo—and from there to distant organs. Studies have confirmed that tattoo pigment travels systemically to the liver, spleen, and kidneys; laser fragmentation accelerates that distribution.
More concerning is the chemical transformation. Azo dyes, which dominate modern colored ink formulations, degrade under laser exposure into primary aromatic amines—the same carcinogenic compounds produced by UV light exposure, but generated all at once in high concentration during each treatment session. A 2020 study in Archives of Toxicology found that laser treatment of phthalocyanine-based green ink generated toxic fragments and potentially harmful new molecular structures not present in the original ink. The body has to process compounds it has never encountered before, in organs that were not designed to handle industrial pigment.
Non-laser removal methods are uniformly worse. Dermabrasion—sanding the skin with a motorized wire brush or abrader—wounds the tissue above the pigment to stimulate an immune response, leaves scarring, and incompletely removes the ink. Surgical excision works for small tattoos but leaves a scar the size of the excised area. Ablative lasers that burn off the entire top layer of skin are non-selective and cause predictable scarring. These methods do not remove pigment; they wound the skin and hope the immune system does the rest.
The bottom line on removal: it is expensive, painful, slow, and not reliably complete. It scatters the chemical load rather than eliminating it. It generates new toxic compounds in the process. And it costs, on average, 50% more than the original tattoo. Think hard before the first needle touches skin.
Self-image and the psychology of tattooed skin
The evidence on self-esteem is mixed but leans in one direction. A 2019 Spanish study using the repertory grid technique found that women with tattoos showed significantly lower self-esteem than matched controls without tattoos, and showed stronger associations between their “ideal body,” “ideal self,” and “tattooed woman” constructs than the untattooed group. In 48% of cases in one UK series, the primary stated reason for seeking tattoo removal was the desire to improve self-esteem. A 2011 London prospective study found that the first tattoo temporarily elevated self-reported self-esteem and body appreciation at 3 weeks, which helps explain why the tattooed population keeps going back—the bump in mood is real but appears short-lived.
Early research from psychiatric settings was frank about the association: multiple studies from the 1950s through 1990s linked tattoos to lower socioeconomic status, lower educational attainment, antisocial personality disorder, borderline personality disorder (BPD), substance abuse, depression, and elevated suicide rates. A 1991 paper in the American Journal of Psychiatry stated that finding a tattoo on physical examination should alert the physician to the possibility of an underlying psychiatric condition.
The landscape has shifted because the tattooed population has broadened, not because the psychiatric associations have disappeared. A 2021 Italian study of 444 tattooed subjects found that as the percentage of body surface covered by tattoos increases, the severity of psychopathological traits increases in a dose-response relationship. Subjects with less than 25% body coverage showed anxious, phobic, obsessive, somatic, and bipolar traits. Those with 26–50% coverage showed borderline, narcissistic, sadistic, and masochistic traits. Those with more than 75% coverage showed the highest values on paranoia, psychopathic deviance, cynicism, antisocial behavior, and family problems scales. Extreme tattooing—on the face, neck, hands, and scalp—is not merely an aesthetic choice pushed to the extreme. It is, the data suggest, a marker of severe and escalating psychopathology.
A 2023 Swiss study of 116 outpatients with confirmed BPD diagnoses found that 69.83% were tattooed and 70.69% had piercings, both rates far above population norms. The number of body modifications correlated significantly with BPD severity scores and with non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI).
None of this means that everyone with a tattoo is mentally ill. The majority are not. But it does mean that for a significant subgroup, tattooing serves a function analogous to self-harm—a way of managing overwhelming emotion through pain and permanent marking of the body. A physician who ignores the ink ignores a diagnostic signal.
Tattoo parlor risks
There are approximately 21,000 tattoo studios in the United States. Florida has the highest studio density per capita. The industry generates roughly $1.6 billion in annual revenue. Regulation is a patchwork: licensing requirements, inspection frequency, and sterilization standards vary from state to state and county to county. Most states require autoclaves; not all require regular performance monitoring. The autoclave is the gold standard for sterilizing reusable equipment, but it does not sterilize the tattoo machine itself, which must be barrier-wrapped between clients.
Ink contamination has caused the most documented harm, and ink is unregulated. The 2012 Mycobacterium chelonae outbreak was traced to pre-mixed gray wash ink sold commercially.
Note: These infections typically indicate tap-water contamination of the surgical field. Since liposuction involves large areas of skin exposure, they are sometimes seen after this procedure, and since I have performed over 5,000 of these, I have experience with them. It is a dreaded experience for the surgeon and nasty for the patient. Mycobacteria are resistant to treatment, hard to culture and identify, and can take many surgical procedures and months of multiple-antibiotic treatment to cure.
The FDA issued draft guidance on contaminated inks in 2023 following reports of outbreaks and recalls. The guidance is not a regulation; it is a suggestion. Tattoo ink in the United States requires no pre-market safety testing, no sterility assurance, and no FDA approval of any kind.
In prison, the equipment is improvised, the ink is improvised (pen ink, soot, burned plastic), and sterility is nonexistent. Hepatitis C prevalence among incarcerated persons in the United States is estimated at 17–23%, and tattooing is a documented transmission vector.
The globalist angle: what the evidence shows
The Globalists use media, education, entertainment, and popular culture to promote social degradation (see post 410). Rain Man (1988) normalized the portrayal of autism. Pharma-sponsored messaging promoted the jabs. Financial engineering was used to destroy family farms and food security. It’s a reasonable question whether the rapid normalization of permanent body disfigurement follows the same pattern.
There is no document, no foundation grant, no Club of Rome white paper with tattooing on its population-control agenda. What exists is circumstantial: the entertainment industry, which Globalists captured decades ago, has pushed tattoo aesthetics through music videos, professional sports broadcasting, reality television, and influencer culture on social media. Celebrity tattoos get mainstream media coverage that no product launch could buy. The result is a population that has internalized permanent body modification as self-expression rather than self-harm. Whether that outcome was engineered or merely exploited, it serves the same function as other Globalist psyops: it degrades the health, self-image, and social capital of the working population.
Consider the profile of the heavily tattooed person the data describe: lower income, lower educational attainment, higher rates of substance abuse, elevated psychiatric comorbidity, and a chronic inflammatory toxic load migrating to the lymph nodes. That’s not the profile of someone positioned to resist centralized power or organize community resistance. That’s the profile of someone easier to manage. The tattoo trend’s effects align precisely with what the Globalists want.
If you don’t have tattoos, don’t get them.
The health signal from the lymph node research alone is sufficient to disqualify the practice. You are injecting a mixture of industrial pigments, heavy metals, and azo compounds that will migrate to your immune system organs and sit there for the rest of your life, driving chronic inflammation.
If you have tattoos, don’t panic. The risk increase from the Swedish and Danish data—while real and statistically meaningful—is not enormous in absolute terms, particularly for small or few tattoos. What you can do: minimize UV exposure to tattooed skin, avoid laser removal unless medically necessary (it generates more toxic breakdown products and disperses the chemical load further), tell your radiologist and MRI technologist about your tattoos before imaging, and make sure your doctors know about them before any lymph node surgery.
Note: Or better yet, refuse most radiology “services” if you are not in extremis. See THIS post for more about why you should say no to them.
If you are getting lymph node staging, for example, for breast cancer or melanoma, your surgeon needs to know about your tattoos before any sentinel node procedure. Pigmented lymph nodes have triggered unnecessary additional surgeries and additional biopsies. Before you seek removal for cosmetic reasons, especially if the tattoo sits in a lymph node drainage zone (armpit, groin, neck), think twice. Removal scatters the problem; it does not solve it.
Synthesis
Tattooing went from a fringe practice to a mainstream ritual in roughly thirty years, driven by media normalization, celebrity endorsement, and a social media culture that rewards visible self-expression. The health data are catching up, and what they show is not reassuring. The ink does not stay where it is put. It migrates to the lymph nodes, where it drives chronic inflammation and, in the populations studied so far, a measurable increase in lymphoma and skin cancer risk. The chemical composition of the inks would not pass basic safety review if it were a pharmaceutical product. Mercury was the original toxin in red ink; azo compounds that degrade into carcinogens under sunlight replaced it. The improvement is marginal.
The removal industry compounds the problem rather than solving it. Laser treatment shatters pigment particles and disperses them more widely through the body’s circulation, while simultaneously generating toxic aromatic amines and novel chemical fragments that no regulatory agency has evaluated for safety. The exit is more expensive and more toxic than the entry.
The psychiatric signal from extreme tattooing is equally important and even more ignored. Covering the face, neck, and hands with permanent ink is not a fashion decision. The research is consistent: the greater the body surface area covered, the more severe the psychopathological traits. A body covered in ink is a body under chronic inflammatory stress and, frequently, a mind under chronic psychological stress.
There is a harder question here. Thirty years ago, a doctor examining a heavily tattooed patient would have immediately considered the psychiatric and socioeconomic context. Today, that clinical instinct has been socialized out of existence. Physicians are trained not to “judge” tattoos, not to raise the diagnostic signal. That is exactly the opposite of good medicine. The ink is in the lymph nodes. The chronic inflammation is real. The psychological associations are documented. A physician who looks at a tattooed patient and thinks “self-expression” instead of “diagnostic opportunity” is failing the patient.
This is a cultural phenomenon whose consequences align perfectly with the Globalist agenda: a population that is chronically inflamed, psychologically destabilized, financially committed to an irreversible choice, and less capable of resisting what is being done to them. Whether by design or by opportunism, the result is the same.
Editing credit: Jim Arnold of Liar’s World Substack. He adds:
Robert, great essay, and you are so right about big media promoting tattoos and body piercings for years. Big fads come from big sources. Several years ago, I read an opinion that one reason for this is to accustom the populace to the notion of body modifications, for instance, RFID glass pellet microchip implants, like a dog ID. Another example is the Microneedle Array Patch (MAP), which was notably proposed for vaccines and is touted by Bill Gates. What’s not to like? HERE is a reference.
Selected references
1. Nielsen C, Jerkeman M, Joud AS. “Tattoos as a risk factor for malignant lymphoma: a population-based case-control study.” eClinicalMedicine. 2024 May 21;72:102649.
2. Clemmensen SB, Mengel-From J, Kaprio J, Frederiksen H, Hjelmborg JvB. “Tattoo ink exposure is associated with lymphoma and skin cancers – a Danish study of twins.” BMC Public Health. 2025 Jan 15.
3. Giulbudagian M, et al. “Lessons learned in a decade: Medical-toxicological view of tattooing.” Journal of the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology. 2024.
4. Blay M, et al. “Body modifications in borderline personality disorder patients: prevalence rates, link with non-suicidal self-injury, and related psychopathology.” Borderline Personal Disord Emot Dysregul. 2023;10:7.
5. Silvestri A, et al. “Massive use of tattoos and psychopathological clinical evidence.” Health Dis Group. 2021.
6. Kertzman S, et al. “Do young women with tattoos have lower self-esteem and body image than their peers without tattoos?” PLOS ONE. 2019.
7. Bauer EM, et al. “Treatments of a phthalocyanine-based green ink for tattoo removal purposes: generation of toxic fragments and potentially harmful morphologies.” Arch Toxicol. 2020;94(7):2359–2375.
8. Kassirer S, et al. “Laser tattoo removal strategies.” J Am Acad Dermatol. 2024.
9. Pew Research Center. “32% of Americans have a tattoo, including 22% who have more than one.” August 2023.
10. PNAS study on tattoo ink macrophage dynamics and vaccine immune response alteration. November 2025.