Tattoos

Peter Wu

8 April 2013

Have you noticed the popularity of tattoos?

Almost as if it is a badge of honour, everyone seems to be sporting one – large and small, artistic or otherwise, in some odd places like the back of the ear, or the side of the neck among others. Many are in fact Chinese characters which don’t mean much except that they are different in the eyes of the Caucasians.

Tell you what, some of those who got the tattoos would not have done it if they were sober or without peer pressure.

For this, we have the great inventor Thomas Edison to thank. Among his many inventions is an electric pen which can punch holes rapidly in a sheet of paper to form an outline of the letters in a stencil fashion, permitting ink to be injected on to the pages below. This allows multiple copies of a document to be made quickly.

This is the fore-runner of the stencil machine (a very messy printing business) until it was superseded by the photo-copying machine. Thank God for this.

Edison’s electric pen didn’t catch on, like numerous of his other inventions. But someone – don’t know who – was taken with the idea of the rapidly punching electric pen and re-developed it to inject ink under skin. The modern tattoo gun was born.

Has the popularity of tattooing reached a peak? Someone obviously thinks so. He suggested that the next phase of this tattoo fade is tattoo removal.

I agree, given the ‘what goes up must come down’ law, or the Pendulum effect.

This must be a business worth thinking about.