Can tattooing damage my health?

If you decide to get tattooed the most important thing you have to keep in mind is how well acquainted the person that will be tattooing you is with the profession of tattooing and everything that goes into it because tattooing is a complicated process not visible in the actual tattoo, the tattoo that momentarily impressed you and encouraged you to get one. There is a lot of people tattooing today but the question remains: Do they actually know what they are doing? The people whos professionality is questionable tattoo artists refer to as (scratchers). They are not favourited in the World of Tattooing. Scratchers, unlike Tattooists (Tattoo Artists) know very little or nothing about tattooing, and due to their ignorance they are not even aware of all the risks they put themselves and their customers to.

As any other procedure on the body tattooing can be very dangerous, can severely damage your health, or even shorten your life, if it is done in an unprofessional way or in unhygienic conditions. The biggest risk of unprofessional tattooing is catching the Hepatitis virus of the B or C type, the HIV virus (causes AIDS), or MRSA, the Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infection. There is also many more diseases transferred by blood or bodily fluids, that you will have to treat in the best case scenario, and in the worst case scenario can be developed into diseases not less dangerous than HIV or Hepatitis C or even cause death. Every respectable tattoo artist and tattoo studio with a good reputation, unlike a scratcher , pays attention to these things, and with proper sterilization and disinfection puts the risk of these diseases and infections to a minimum.

By not getting tattooed by a professional you are also risking an allergic reaction to a pigment used in the process of tattooing. To buy proper tattooing ink or the tools for professional tattooing one must show documentation that proves they own a company or firm in which tattooing is registered as a business to the distributor of those tools and ink. After buying them, those same goods have to, under the croatian law, pass the customs and sanitary inspection during which the same documentation must be shown. Therefore, scratchers can only use ink and tools of questionable quality unlike tattooists.

There are also strict instructions one must abide that are given before and after the tattooing process. If your way of life dictates a continuity that can not be broken for 7 days, it is advised to postpone the tattoo appointment for a couple of days, week or months than to suffer unnecessary consequences like inflammation or redness of the tattooed skin, because the healing process didn’t go the way it was supposed to. The end result of these consequences could also be a lesser quality of the tattoo.