How to Make Tattoo Ink

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Doc Lowry and we're talking about tattooing. Kita here is setting up with ink and you can see right now she's filling up some black ink. In the tattoo world, the black ink is a drawing ink that's pure black. It's almost pure carbon, instead of being a combination of different colors so you get a true black out of it. Of course, it's always a point to be cautious going to amateurs. They might not know where to buy their ink so you might not be getting a true black. But it's real critical for a lot of today's tattoos to have a good strong black. The colors that we used are all made from natural pigment so they're oxides of different metals that provide the different colors, and this has been tradition in the industry for...since it's inception. So they're just dry pigment just like you would make paint out of and then they're mixed with some caring agents that liquefy them so that they're prepared for tattooing. Also, in the industry now, they use, some people are using plastic inks and they're made of little plastic particles. The plastic's had some disadvantages as far as like color matching and color blending and such, and we prefer just to use the natural pigments that've been in the industry for years."