Carbonbased
03-15-2009, 07:05 AM
So I for one am tired of hearing how people say "hay I got a GLOW IN THE DARK tattoo" when they really mean "I have a UV REACTIVE tattoo". And after doing some digging I found out that really no one does true glow in the dark tattoos because there is a stigma surrounding glow in the dark tattoo ink, mainly that it contains phosphorus and other nasty that cause all kinds of cancer, most shops won't even tattoo with glow ink for this reason.. Well shit I said! "this is the 21st century we have shit that is nontoxic that glows in the dark!" so I set off on to find something that would work and finally settled on THIS! (http://unitednuclear.com/glow.htm)
It is alumina oxide (AlO3) which is completely inert in the body under normal conditions, so much so that it is used in its ceramic form in prosthetic joints. The alumina is then doped with europium a heavy rare earth metal. this is the only part that I remain slightly wary about, europium IS toxic to a degree, but the amount that will be used for the tattoo will be well less than a gram of pigment so I'm not particularly worried.
The main questions are...
will my body reject the ink?
will the ink be visible in my skin under normal conditions?
will this shit give me cancer (this one may take a while to figure out;)
The pigment is slightly off whit in appearance and about the size of very fine sand, witch is very course for tattoo ink I know.
I have a shop that has agreed to do a small piece with this ink, so my plan is to first wash the pigment with Everclear ethanol in order to remove any oils or debris (this stuff was never meant to be used in vivo after all).
Then put it in a glass vial and autoclave the shit out of it, after that the carrier fluid of the artists choice will be used and the wrest you probably know...
I have pix of the test spot that I ran about a 2 weeks ago and will try to post them tomorrow.
I hope that this Kinda how to thread will help anyone thinking of getting a real glow in the dark tattoo:D
It is alumina oxide (AlO3) which is completely inert in the body under normal conditions, so much so that it is used in its ceramic form in prosthetic joints. The alumina is then doped with europium a heavy rare earth metal. this is the only part that I remain slightly wary about, europium IS toxic to a degree, but the amount that will be used for the tattoo will be well less than a gram of pigment so I'm not particularly worried.
The main questions are...
will my body reject the ink?
will the ink be visible in my skin under normal conditions?
will this shit give me cancer (this one may take a while to figure out;)
The pigment is slightly off whit in appearance and about the size of very fine sand, witch is very course for tattoo ink I know.
I have a shop that has agreed to do a small piece with this ink, so my plan is to first wash the pigment with Everclear ethanol in order to remove any oils or debris (this stuff was never meant to be used in vivo after all).
Then put it in a glass vial and autoclave the shit out of it, after that the carrier fluid of the artists choice will be used and the wrest you probably know...
I have pix of the test spot that I ran about a 2 weeks ago and will try to post them tomorrow.
I hope that this Kinda how to thread will help anyone thinking of getting a real glow in the dark tattoo:D