Why do tattoos last forever?

Guess how tattoos stay there forever, even as your cells die and are replaced?

French researchers say they have found the answer, and it’s a little bit surprising.

They found that immune system cells called macrophages eat the ink, and then pass it to their replacements when they die.

So the tattoo ink doesn’t stain skin cells, as many people had believed. Instead, microscopic blobs of ink are passed along from one generation of macrophages to another, according to the report in the Journal of Experimental Medicine.

“We further demonstrated that tattoo pigment particles can undergo successive cycles of capture–release–recapture without any tattoo vanishing,” Anna Baranska of the French research institute INSERM in Marseille and colleagues wrote.


Source : nbcnews