Tätowierungen könnten ein Risikofaktor für Melanome sein, es sind jedoch weitere Studien erforderlich, bevor von einem ursächlichen Zusammenhang gesprochen werden kann

That’s a risk I’m willing to take

If you actually look into it a lot of the inks used for tattooing do have increasing evidence of health risks, and they certainly are NOT proven to be inert. Some are photosensitizers. Then there’s the whole aspect that they are not regulated to a medical standard, there is no special approval for ink sourcing, artists can buy it from wherever with the only liability being if something obviously horrible happens right away. Most artists care about their clients so they do buy from reputable sources, but the issue is those reputable sources are overseas manufacturers with no presence on North American soil and are basically immune to liability because they can just reform under new names. Some brands have been around for a long while and have fairly earned trust, but I do worry about the longterm effects of tattooing. It might be something like a weaker form of smoking where it’s definitely harmful but surprisingly not as dramatically harmful as you’d expect; i.e most smokers do still live to old age, but they are much much more likely to have terrible health issues once they get there and earlier onset of fatal diseases. Tattooing is probably not anywhere near as severe as smoking in terms of volume of harmful chemical exposure, but perhaps it does bump up your odds of lymphoma, melanoma, and certain autoimmune disorders.

**Even heavy tattooing seems like it’s probably not as harmful as something like smoking just in terms of comparing the type of health indicators we can measure (smoking causes massive irritation to all regular smokers lungs when their function is measured, it’s pretty much impossible to actually „tank“ inhaling smoke and not have a harmful response, whereas most people with tattoos seem to not show signs of inflammation or irritated tissue long term).** HOWEVER, there are very grounded long term concerns about your odds over your lifespan for certain cancers and autoimmune disorders – seemingly because the ink chemicals are possibly bioactive and can sometimes migrate through the body. There is no evidence that „most“ people with tattoos experience this to a concerning degree, but there is evidence that we may be underestimating the amount that do. So it’s a personal health judgement call.

Further studies will definitely be needed, but given that it was even mentioned once on a Reddit post, there’s a population that’s now going to take this for the gospel truth and annoy the hell out of everybody else on other subs calling tattoo ink cancer sauce.