So you have been looking at a lot of cool cross tattoo designs in your local tattoo shop. But have you really made up your mind about getting one? Have you thoroughly done your research on getting a tattoo? Read on for some of the few things you may want to put into consideration:First, what is a tattoo? A medical and scientific definition gives us something that means: "a process of permanently inserting colored pigments below a person's skin with the use of a needle or any sharp instrument". There are other dictionaries that define a tattoo as an indelible mark inserted underneath the skin. This gives us the idea that any instrument will do the job and that it does not matter if an instrument is sharp or not.
Actually, a sharp needle is one of the first requirements for those cool cross tattoo designs to come out looking perfect. A sharp sanitized needle to be more precise, is needed to puncture the skin so the pigment or ink can be inserted underneath the skin. The human skin on the other hand, consists of three layers: the epidermis, the dermis and the subcutaneous layer which is also known as the hypodermis that attaches your skin to the muscles and the bones. The top layer of the skin, basically consists of a layer of dead skin cells and a person with healthy skin, replaces this layer every single month. So if that is the case, how come tattoos stay permanent?
If you really are hooked on cool cross tattoo designs and would like to know how exactly these designs would remain with you for the rest of your life, read on. A tattoo is permanent simply because once it is done correctly, the tattoo artist will pierce the ink or pigment particles below the epidermis and right into the part of the skin between the epidermal and dermal skin layers. The second layer of the skin, the dermal layer, contains a lot of blood vessels, hair follicles, nerves as well as lymph vessels. When you get a tattoo, the ink or pigments get trapped in the dermis.
Since ink or tattoo pigments are foreign objects to your body, the lymphocytes will try to remove the ink from your body especially if the ink that was used is inorganic or toxic. Because the dermis is pierced with massive amount of organic or non toxic pigment, the lymphocytes would then try to remove what it can from the body. What it could not remove is taken care of by the macrophages which are another form of white blood cells. What these does is to encircle the organic ink particles and begin a process that would start the formation of scar tissues, imprisoning the organic ink particles in place and there it will forever remain.Should you decide on cool cross tattoo designs or any other form of body art and you do decide to get that tattoo, make sure that you do a background research on the tattoo art shop that you would be going to. ( By Russell Reugh )