The 3-D Printing of Body Art Future Considered

Anyone who has ever had a tattoo is usually asked by their friends if it hurt. Sometimes it does hurt, sometimes the pain threshold is not that bad, and sometimes it is painful as hell, or at least they say. I'm not sure if in the future it has to be that way, nor do I assume that the tattoo artist of yesterday will be the person inflicting that pain in the future of tomorrow. Indeed, I'd like to discuss this with you for a few moments if I might because I see some technology on the horizon which lends itself very well to this industry sector.

Imagine sticking one of your body parts into a machine and it scored, etched, sliced, and 3-D printed a tattoo or piece of artwork on your skin. Sure it might be painful or maybe not, why not you ask, well the machine would sense where all the nerve endings were and administer local anesthesia using an ultra-thin array of fine needles on the scale of 10% the size of a human hair prior to beginning the printing sequence. Okay so, now that I've piqued your curiosity, let's take all this to a higher level.

What I'm talking about is the future of 3-D printing of tattoos and body art. Whereas, it is true that today you can take in any picture of anything you'd like to a tattoo artist and they can draw that on your skin, there is a lot of difference between artistic ability when it comes to tattoo artists. What if every tattoo was perfect every time? No more of those jailhouse type tattoos at the local tattoo parlor. We are talking works of art, each and every one of them. After all, that's why they call it body art, and it should be art, as it is a statement of personal individuality. Can a machine do it better you wonder?

Absolutely, flawlessly, that is unless you yank your arm, leg or torso out of the machine prematurely. But even so, if you wiggle, squirm, or move, the machine would sense movement, stop, and then start again when you stopped moving finding the exact place where it left off using visual imaging technologies. If you moved it might pull up on the cutting device in 1000th of a second, much faster than the reflexes of a tattoo artist. In the future it will be machines doing 3-D body art, not humans. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.

Lance Winslow has launched a new provocative series of eBooks on Future Concepts. Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank; http://www.worldthinktank.net