“Most of the research on the biology of tattooing is still sort of the old fashioned, ‘Oh my God, is it cancerous? Oh my God, are you gonna get an infection?’” said Christopher Lynn, a medical anthropologist at the University of Alabama. “The idea that tattooing is this dangerous thing is not really attested to by modern hygiene and sanitation.” |
Background
The Inking of Immunity project is an ongoing study of tattooing, health, identity, and endocrine and immune functions. We work in the United States and Pacific Islands, with an emphasis on Samoa. We take a biocultural medical approach and use a variety of methodologies to conduct this research, including the cultural consonance approach, biomarkers analysis, and participant-observation.
I started the Inking of Immunity project in 2010 as a fun way to get undergraduate students in my lab involved in interesting biocultural research. Our first study began with various teams of students collecting data in spurts at local tattoo studios. Then I recruited master's student Johnna Dominguez to take it on as her thesis project, which included investigation of attitudes toward tattooed women in the US Southeast. Johnna received the Outstanding Thesis Award for her project the year she graduated, and we published a paper based on the biological portion our lab had started with. That paper went viral and with its circulation in the media came new questions. We thought the study would just be something to pique student interest in doing research, but we received so much attention from so many quarters that we realized we had several more questions worth continuing to investigate through the Inking of Immunity project.
In 2016 I had the opportunity to conduct research in American Samoa with anthropologist Michaela Howells (University of North Carolina Wilmington) and realized the extent their native tattooing is practiced, so we returned in 2017 to conduct a follow-up study there. That study has led to work among Pacific Islanders in Seattle, Samoa, and Hawaii. In 2019 I started a documentary called Tattoo Your Mouth First with filmmaker Adam Booher, though filming has been interrupted by COVID-19.
We are currently in the beginning phase of a 3-year National Science Foundation funded study in collaboration with biological anthropologist Michael Muehlenbein (Baylor University) called "The Effects of Markers of Shared Identity on Inflammation and Stress," which is an investigation of the importance of tatau to Samoan identity.
We have become involved in several related projects and studies of tattooing through the Inking of Immunity. During the COVID-19 travel restrictions, doctoral student Mike Smetana and I started a peer-to-peer tattoo research and science podcast with evolutionary psychologist Becci Owens (University of Sunderland), and Becci invited us to collaborate on a scoping review of psychological studies of tattooing. We have recently started a project on sickness behavior associated with getting tattooed with anthropologists Saige Kelmelis (University of South Dakota) and Eric Shattuck (University of Texas at San Antonio) and psychologist Jessica Perrotte (Texas State University).
Below are a history of the project through our publications, photos from the field, answers to Frequently Asked Questions, Inking of Immunity podcast information, a list of collaborators and partners, and select media coverage of our work.
I started the Inking of Immunity project in 2010 as a fun way to get undergraduate students in my lab involved in interesting biocultural research. Our first study began with various teams of students collecting data in spurts at local tattoo studios. Then I recruited master's student Johnna Dominguez to take it on as her thesis project, which included investigation of attitudes toward tattooed women in the US Southeast. Johnna received the Outstanding Thesis Award for her project the year she graduated, and we published a paper based on the biological portion our lab had started with. That paper went viral and with its circulation in the media came new questions. We thought the study would just be something to pique student interest in doing research, but we received so much attention from so many quarters that we realized we had several more questions worth continuing to investigate through the Inking of Immunity project.
In 2016 I had the opportunity to conduct research in American Samoa with anthropologist Michaela Howells (University of North Carolina Wilmington) and realized the extent their native tattooing is practiced, so we returned in 2017 to conduct a follow-up study there. That study has led to work among Pacific Islanders in Seattle, Samoa, and Hawaii. In 2019 I started a documentary called Tattoo Your Mouth First with filmmaker Adam Booher, though filming has been interrupted by COVID-19.
We are currently in the beginning phase of a 3-year National Science Foundation funded study in collaboration with biological anthropologist Michael Muehlenbein (Baylor University) called "The Effects of Markers of Shared Identity on Inflammation and Stress," which is an investigation of the importance of tatau to Samoan identity.
We have become involved in several related projects and studies of tattooing through the Inking of Immunity. During the COVID-19 travel restrictions, doctoral student Mike Smetana and I started a peer-to-peer tattoo research and science podcast with evolutionary psychologist Becci Owens (University of Sunderland), and Becci invited us to collaborate on a scoping review of psychological studies of tattooing. We have recently started a project on sickness behavior associated with getting tattooed with anthropologists Saige Kelmelis (University of South Dakota) and Eric Shattuck (University of Texas at San Antonio) and psychologist Jessica Perrotte (Texas State University).
Below are a history of the project through our publications, photos from the field, answers to Frequently Asked Questions, Inking of Immunity podcast information, a list of collaborators and partners, and select media coverage of our work.
Studies
CD Lynn, JT Dominguez*, JA DeCaro. Tattooing to “toughen” up: Tattoo experience and secretory immunoglobulin A. American Journal of Human Biology, 2016, 28:603-609, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajhb.22847/abstract.
Lyle Tuttle's suggestion that antibodies might build up in response to tattooing gave me the idea for how to conduct this study. I started thinking about it in grad school and about how I might combine past interests in tattoo culture and evolutionary or medical anthropology. Previous ethnologic analysis by Ludvico and Kurland (1995), Bronstad and Singh (1997), and Sosis and coauthors (2007) suggested the evolutionary models I could consider. These came together for me when an undergrad who wanted to study anthropology from a medical anthropology approach came to me. I looked for salivary biomarkers of immune function because I'd worked with salivary biomarkers before and found secretory immunoglobulin A (sIgA) frequently used in studies of immune response to exercise in athletes. Undergraduates in the lab began data collection, which was ultimately taken over by Johnna Dominquez as part of her master's project. We didn't know if sIgA in saliva was sensitive enough to pick up stress of local dermal injury, since it reflects circulating immune function, and we ultimately did not collect as much data as intended. Fellow UA anthropologist Jason DeCaro conducted the biomarker analysis in our Department's Human Development and Developmental Ecology Lab, including secondary analysis of cortisol after it was graciously suggested by a reviewer. Despite the limitations, we found the predicted relationship, published in AJHB, put together a press release with our PR department, and boom. It went viral. See below for select media from the hundreds of pieces that have been published.
CD Lynn, CA Medeiros*. Tattooing commitment, quality, and football in Southeastern North America. In Lynn, Glaze, Evans , Reed (eds) Evolution Education in the American South: Culture, Politics, and Resources in and around Alabama. 2017, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/978-1-349-95139-0_14
This chapter began as an undergraduate research paper about Native American tattooing that my mentor, linguistic anthropologist John Beatty, had advised I try to publish. I went back to it my first year at UA and developed it into something that I sent to prehistoric archaeologist Aaron Deter-Wolf, who I'd met via a student in our department. Aaron asked if he could include it in an edited volume he was assembling, but ultimately the publisher's series editor rejected the chapter. I sent it to several journals, and it continued to morph. Finally, I had two separate revise and resubmits that were so substantial in fields outside my depth (American Studies on one hand and ethnohistory on the other), so I began collaborating with historic archaeologist Cassie Medeiros, who was then a master's student in our department to push it in the ethnohistory direction. However, by the time we had completed revisions, the editor of the journal had changed and had no record of our original submission. Ultimately, when I assembled an edited volume on evolution education in the South, I rewrote it as resource for how evolutionary theory could be used to analyze tattooing as a "hard-to-fake signal of commitment" and "costly honest signal of fitness."
CD Lynn, T Puckett*, A Guitar*, ND Roy*. Shirts or skins?: Tattoos as costly honest signals of fitness and affiliation among US intercollegiate athletes and other undergraduates. Evolutionary Psychological Science, 2019, 5:151-165, https://doi.org/10.1007/s40806-018-0174-4.
In rewriting the preceding chapter and considering the possible signaling functions of tattooing among elite athletes and their fans, I hypothesized that fit athletes might get more tattoos in general to amplify their fitness, whereas fans might be more likely to get tattoos about athletics (e.g., team logos) to signal their commitment. In reviewing the literature, I found a really short epidemiological survey that had been used to assess the relationships among tattooing, piercing, and associated medical complications that had been developed for and administered among university students with special attention to athletes. I modified it slightly for our purposes and planned to use the internet to try to get a national sample. We got a decent national sample but thought we should take advantage of our position at a large and athletically elite university. The beauty of that approach is that we could receive IRB approval to email the survey to all enrolled undergraduates. Keeping the survey to 5 minutes to complete and emphasizing that we were conducting a tattoo study, which inherently interests people, we were able to obtain a big sample with a representative cross-section of athletes. We found that for the most part, only a few sports like football have more males in particular getting tattooed than the average undergraduate. That could be due to Alabama football as a variable has an unusual influence, but sports like swimming showed similar effect. An interesting finding from this study suggests that tattooing could be a costly honest signal, but we should be really cautious about this without more research. However, we found that tattooing is more commonly practiced by athletes in healthy BMI categories and that tattoo-related medical complications are more common among non-athletes in unhealthy BMI categories, suggesting a possible direct link between the tattoo as a visible signal of health and actual health.
Lyle Tuttle's suggestion that antibodies might build up in response to tattooing gave me the idea for how to conduct this study. I started thinking about it in grad school and about how I might combine past interests in tattoo culture and evolutionary or medical anthropology. Previous ethnologic analysis by Ludvico and Kurland (1995), Bronstad and Singh (1997), and Sosis and coauthors (2007) suggested the evolutionary models I could consider. These came together for me when an undergrad who wanted to study anthropology from a medical anthropology approach came to me. I looked for salivary biomarkers of immune function because I'd worked with salivary biomarkers before and found secretory immunoglobulin A (sIgA) frequently used in studies of immune response to exercise in athletes. Undergraduates in the lab began data collection, which was ultimately taken over by Johnna Dominquez as part of her master's project. We didn't know if sIgA in saliva was sensitive enough to pick up stress of local dermal injury, since it reflects circulating immune function, and we ultimately did not collect as much data as intended. Fellow UA anthropologist Jason DeCaro conducted the biomarker analysis in our Department's Human Development and Developmental Ecology Lab, including secondary analysis of cortisol after it was graciously suggested by a reviewer. Despite the limitations, we found the predicted relationship, published in AJHB, put together a press release with our PR department, and boom. It went viral. See below for select media from the hundreds of pieces that have been published.
CD Lynn, CA Medeiros*. Tattooing commitment, quality, and football in Southeastern North America. In Lynn, Glaze, Evans , Reed (eds) Evolution Education in the American South: Culture, Politics, and Resources in and around Alabama. 2017, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/978-1-349-95139-0_14
This chapter began as an undergraduate research paper about Native American tattooing that my mentor, linguistic anthropologist John Beatty, had advised I try to publish. I went back to it my first year at UA and developed it into something that I sent to prehistoric archaeologist Aaron Deter-Wolf, who I'd met via a student in our department. Aaron asked if he could include it in an edited volume he was assembling, but ultimately the publisher's series editor rejected the chapter. I sent it to several journals, and it continued to morph. Finally, I had two separate revise and resubmits that were so substantial in fields outside my depth (American Studies on one hand and ethnohistory on the other), so I began collaborating with historic archaeologist Cassie Medeiros, who was then a master's student in our department to push it in the ethnohistory direction. However, by the time we had completed revisions, the editor of the journal had changed and had no record of our original submission. Ultimately, when I assembled an edited volume on evolution education in the South, I rewrote it as resource for how evolutionary theory could be used to analyze tattooing as a "hard-to-fake signal of commitment" and "costly honest signal of fitness."
CD Lynn, T Puckett*, A Guitar*, ND Roy*. Shirts or skins?: Tattoos as costly honest signals of fitness and affiliation among US intercollegiate athletes and other undergraduates. Evolutionary Psychological Science, 2019, 5:151-165, https://doi.org/10.1007/s40806-018-0174-4.
In rewriting the preceding chapter and considering the possible signaling functions of tattooing among elite athletes and their fans, I hypothesized that fit athletes might get more tattoos in general to amplify their fitness, whereas fans might be more likely to get tattoos about athletics (e.g., team logos) to signal their commitment. In reviewing the literature, I found a really short epidemiological survey that had been used to assess the relationships among tattooing, piercing, and associated medical complications that had been developed for and administered among university students with special attention to athletes. I modified it slightly for our purposes and planned to use the internet to try to get a national sample. We got a decent national sample but thought we should take advantage of our position at a large and athletically elite university. The beauty of that approach is that we could receive IRB approval to email the survey to all enrolled undergraduates. Keeping the survey to 5 minutes to complete and emphasizing that we were conducting a tattoo study, which inherently interests people, we were able to obtain a big sample with a representative cross-section of athletes. We found that for the most part, only a few sports like football have more males in particular getting tattooed than the average undergraduate. That could be due to Alabama football as a variable has an unusual influence, but sports like swimming showed similar effect. An interesting finding from this study suggests that tattooing could be a costly honest signal, but we should be really cautious about this without more research. However, we found that tattooing is more commonly practiced by athletes in healthy BMI categories and that tattoo-related medical complications are more common among non-athletes in unhealthy BMI categories, suggesting a possible direct link between the tattoo as a visible signal of health and actual health.
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AMERICAN SAMOA
CD Lynn, ME Howells, D Herdrich, J Ioane, D Hudson, TW Fitiao. The evolutionary adaptation of body art: Tattoo as an honest signal of enhanced immune response in American Samoa. American Journal of Human Biology, 2019, 5:151-165.Online version, e23347, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajhb.23347. In 2016, Michaela Howells (University of North Carolina Wilmington) brought me to American Samoa as a research collaborator on project about Zika Virus. I saw how pervasive and extensive tattooing is among Samoans of all walks of life and recognized the Samoan Islands as an excellent site for follow-up study. I obtained funding from UA programs to return with Michaela the following summer. We collaborated with American Samoan Historic Preservation Office Director David Herdrich and three local tattoo artists, Joe Ioane (Off Da Rock), Duffy Hudson (Tatau Manaia), and Su'a Wilson Fitiao (master hand-tap tattooist). This preliminary study is both an introduction for me to tattooing in the Pacific and a replication of our previous Alabama research. It is a preliminary introduction because it involves pre-electric hand-tap and modern electric traditions, but American Samoa is small and peripheral to larger tattoo communities of Hawaii, Samoa, New Zealand, and the US mainland. It's a replication (though not independent) of the Alabama study; we found the same associations between tattoo experience and biomarker changes that suggest tattooing primes our immune system for later dermal stress. The ability to generalize from these findings is again limited due to our small sample, but they validate this and other directions for studying immune and endocrine function via the tattooing model. I was originally going to submit this article to another journal, since the first article on tattooing and immune function was also placed in AJHB. However, I was invited to give a talk on the subject as a special session of AAA by Morgan Hoke and my PhD adviser Larry Schell, so of course I participated. And when they turned the session into a special issue of AJHB, I realized most articles are more likely to be read if they are in a relevant special issue than just part of an ad hoc set of articles, we opted to support the journal that has supported us. |
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PUYALLUP, WA (SEATTLE)
CD Lynn, ME Howells, MP Muehlenbein, H Wood*, GW Caballero*, TJ Nowak*, J Gassen. Psychoneuroimmunology and tattooing. Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology, 2022, 8:355-369. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40750-022-00202-x. When we were in American Samoa in 2017, we met journalist Blue Chen-Fruean, who hosts Polynesian tattoo festivals with her brother Whitey Chen. They invited us to be the "official scientists" of the 2018 Northwest Tatau Festival in Puyallup, WA. They graciously provided us full access to all festival events and a booth at the festival for our data collection. Michaela and I were joined by her UNCW students Holly Wood and Grey Caballero, who assisted with data collection. We managed to get samples from around 50 participants in two days and begin considering in this paper how the various mechanisms of endocrine and immune function are interacting to produce the effect we're detecting and how that effect may benefit health. These mechanisms appear all to be consistent with theoretical models from allostasis and psychoneuroimmunology, so we provide an additional model (tattooing) by which to investigate the models. I crowdsourced funding to attend this festival and collect data, but analyzing the samples had to wait more than a year for me to obtain the funding to pay for it and COVID-19 related delays in processing. I reached out to Michael Muehlenbein (Baylor University), whose evolutionary medicine lab has done tons of work on biomarkers, immune function, and signaling in non-human primates, and found him extremely interested in applying these approaches to tattoo research. Michael and his Baylor lab members Tomasz Nowak and Jeffrey Gassen have contributed to research design and conducted all of the biomarker analysis for this and subsequent papers. I applied for and received Wenner-Gren Foundation funding to collect more data and have it all analyzed. Thus, these data were not analyzed until after the next field season. CD Lynn, ME Howells, MP Muehlenbein, T Nowak*, A Henderson*. Tattooing as a phenotypic gambit. American Journal of Biological Anthropology, 2023, doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.24741 One of the benefits of collaborating with Michael Muehlenbein is that they have developed a new technique for assaying bacteria-killing activity in saliva, which we explore here. A phenotypic gambit is something that optimizes fitness somehow outside of genetic constraints. We compare bacteria-killing activity in saliva samples from two previous studies (American Samoa and Puyallup, WA) to tattoo experience and compare those to analysis with secretory immunoglobulin A as the immune biomarker. |
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SAMOA
CD Lynn. Untangling tattoos’ influence on immune response. The Conversation, October 2, 2019 https://theconversation.com/untangling-tattoos-influence-on-immune-response-121852. I used the Wenner-Gren funding to travel to Samoa and collect saliva samples from people specifically receiving Samoan hand-tap tattoos, because it is a particularly intense experience and impact on the immune system. I was applying for National Geographic and National Science Foundation funding as well and used this field season as an opportunity to collect preliminary data toward that end. The National Geographic application was to fund a Storytelling project, and I initiated this by hiring filmmaker Adam Booher to accompany us to the field to develop a documentary. We did not get the National Geographic grant and have yet to complete filming for the documentary because of that and COVID-19 delays. However, I watched Sulu'ape Tatau work all summer, collected samples from people getting pe'a and malu tatau, and filmed about 100 hours of interviews and Samoan tattooing. I wrote this short article on the plane ride home for the open access magazine The Conversation inspired by the fieldwork and a week-long AAAS Leshner Fellowship program in Washington, DC I'd participated in earlier in the summer. The goal of the Leshner Fellowship is to help mid-career professionals develop their public engagement skills and help change our institutions to better integrate public engagement in research and teaching programs. I wrote this summary of fieldwork and my previous findings and was really impressed with the editorial process of The Conversation. I was paired with an editor who scrutinized the piece far more closely than most journal editors, which I really appreciate. It made for a great piece, which is perhaps why it was picked up by CNN Health and went viral. The Conversation has a dashboard that allows me to track views of the article, and it hit 750,000 within two weeks of publication and has stayed in that realm ever since. In terms of raw numbers, that is the single most impactful piece I've ever written. Pretty good take-home lesson for the summer's activities. CD Lynn, LA Landgraf*, T Nowak*, MP Muehlenbein, J Gassen, A Henderson*. A case study of endocrine and immune response to traditional hand-tap tattooing. American Journal of Human Biology (In prep). I am still making sense of the data collected in the summer of 2019, when I collected saliva samples from people getting hand-tapped tattoos over the course of days, including one case that allowed me to collect a diurnal profile on the day he started his pe'a. |
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R Owens, S Filoromo*, LA Landgraf*, M Smetana*, CD Lynn. The psychology of body modification, a scoping review. Humanities & Social Sciences Communications (In review).
I started collaborating with evolutionary psychologist Becci Owens (University of Sunderland) via Twitter. We met through shared interests in tattoo research and evolutionary approaches, which turned into some efforts at getting projects going. As many efforts turned online during COVID-19, I volunteered my lab to collaborate in this transatlantic project. It took us awhile to learn how to conduct a scoping review, but what we ultimately found is interesting and important. There is a persistent sense in the tattoo research literature that there is social stigma toward tattooed people, though no findings really support this. We find this may largely be a by-product of how the field of psychology has developed over time and what its researchers have tended to study. For a period of time, psychologists sought to determine what caused or reflected deviance, and they saw tattoos on people in mental hospitals and penal institutions, so they conducted so many studies of tattooing and deviance that, we suggest, it came to seem that there must be some association. With the flourishing of social psychology, the emphasis has changed, and we anticipate fewer and fewer such reifying studies.
M Smetana*, CD Lynn, M Samadelli. The medical anthropology of tattooing, past and present. In Manni and d’Errico (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Body Modifications. Oxford: Oxford University Press (In review).
During COVID-19 we started a peer-to-peer tattoo research podcast as a way of networking with other scholars and researching a tattoo book. Along the way, I reached out to Christopher Henshilwood about their red ochre research at Blombos Cave in South Africa. Henshilwood referred me to his colleague Francisco d'Errico, who I invited onto the podcast. While we were trying to make that happen (still pending), d'Errico told his colleague Franz Manni about our research. They are the editors of the Oxford Handbook of Body Modification and were looking for authors to write a chapter on the medical anthropology of tattooing. Marco Samadelli is an expert on the therapeutic tattooing of Otzi the Iceman, the Copper Age mummy found in the Alps. Due to a misunderstanding, he turned in a section instead of a chapter, and we were happy to include it in our chapter, as it provides the introduction to everything we think we know about therapeutic tattoo.
*Denotes student/mentee collaborator
I started collaborating with evolutionary psychologist Becci Owens (University of Sunderland) via Twitter. We met through shared interests in tattoo research and evolutionary approaches, which turned into some efforts at getting projects going. As many efforts turned online during COVID-19, I volunteered my lab to collaborate in this transatlantic project. It took us awhile to learn how to conduct a scoping review, but what we ultimately found is interesting and important. There is a persistent sense in the tattoo research literature that there is social stigma toward tattooed people, though no findings really support this. We find this may largely be a by-product of how the field of psychology has developed over time and what its researchers have tended to study. For a period of time, psychologists sought to determine what caused or reflected deviance, and they saw tattoos on people in mental hospitals and penal institutions, so they conducted so many studies of tattooing and deviance that, we suggest, it came to seem that there must be some association. With the flourishing of social psychology, the emphasis has changed, and we anticipate fewer and fewer such reifying studies.
M Smetana*, CD Lynn, M Samadelli. The medical anthropology of tattooing, past and present. In Manni and d’Errico (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Body Modifications. Oxford: Oxford University Press (In review).
During COVID-19 we started a peer-to-peer tattoo research podcast as a way of networking with other scholars and researching a tattoo book. Along the way, I reached out to Christopher Henshilwood about their red ochre research at Blombos Cave in South Africa. Henshilwood referred me to his colleague Francisco d'Errico, who I invited onto the podcast. While we were trying to make that happen (still pending), d'Errico told his colleague Franz Manni about our research. They are the editors of the Oxford Handbook of Body Modification and were looking for authors to write a chapter on the medical anthropology of tattooing. Marco Samadelli is an expert on the therapeutic tattooing of Otzi the Iceman, the Copper Age mummy found in the Alps. Due to a misunderstanding, he turned in a section instead of a chapter, and we were happy to include it in our chapter, as it provides the introduction to everything we think we know about therapeutic tattoo.
*Denotes student/mentee collaborator
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HAWAII
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Frequently Asked Questions
Should someone with autoimmune disease get tattooed to help their immune system?
No. Do other things for your health like exercise. Our findings are preliminary and indicate health benefits but the size of the effect. It's not clear how big the benefits are of getting tattooed and if they counteract the costs of healing for everyone.
Some of the headlines said that getting multiple tattoos could cure the common cold. Is that true?
Not exactly. We wouldn't actually know because no one has tested the relationship of getting tattooed and rhinoviruses or, better yet, of tattoo artists and colds because they're hunkering over in an uncomfortable position in close proximity to multiple strangers per day. Those headlines were purposely ambiguous to get people to read the articles, and I take some responsibility for allowing the press release to suggest as much.
So what does your research say about tattooing and health?
We look specifically at how the immune and endocrine systems respond to getting a new tattoo and relative to previous tattoo experience. We find the people's immune systems seem to adjust to the stress of getting tattooed, moderating its reaction to each subsequent tattoo and possible other dermal insults.
Should I get tattoos to be healthy?
Tattooing can be part of a healthy lifestyle, but there's no one silver bullet to make you healthy. If you're practicing a healthy lifestyle and get tattooed, your body should respond better than if your aren't and contribute to the overall health. If you're unhealthy and get a tattoo, the additional strain on your immune system could lead to complications with tattoo healing or other issues.
Does my age matter in how my immune system responds to tattooing?
Probably. There's a great TikTok about "tattoo flu," a phenomenon we're currently exploring. But as a relatively older dude (in my 50s) who has been tattooed throughout my life, I can attest that I feel pain and discomfort more poignantly now than I did when I was younger. I can detect the influence of everything I put in my body now, which used to never be the case. So, again, anecdotally, yes, but we're also testing it just to provide you evidence. Stay tuned.
Partners
Collaborators on this project have included Johnna Dominguez, Jason DeCaro, Michaela Howells, David Herdrich, Joe Ioane, Duffy Hudson, Su'a Wilson Fitiao, Blue Chen-Fruean, Whitey Chen, Michael Muehlenbein, Tomasz Nowak, Jeffrey Gassen, Holly Wood, Grey Caballero, Mandy Guitar, Nick Roy, Michael Smetana, Kira Yancey, Becci Owens, Saige Kelmelis, Eric Shattuck, Jessica Perrotte.
This work would not have been possible without funding from crowdfunding (Experiment.com), the National Science Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation, University of Alabama, and University of North Carolina Wilmington and support from Centre for Samoan Studies, National University of Samoa, Sulu'ape Tatau, Sulu'ape Skinz, Northwest Tatau Festival, American Samoa Historic Preservation Office, American Samoa Department of Health, American Samoa Community College, University of Hawaii at Manoa Samoan Language Program, Off Da Rock Tattoo (American Samoa), Tatau Manaia (American Samoa), Red Arbor Tattoos (Sioux Falls, SD).
This work would not have been possible without funding from crowdfunding (Experiment.com), the National Science Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation, University of Alabama, and University of North Carolina Wilmington and support from Centre for Samoan Studies, National University of Samoa, Sulu'ape Tatau, Sulu'ape Skinz, Northwest Tatau Festival, American Samoa Historic Preservation Office, American Samoa Department of Health, American Samoa Community College, University of Hawaii at Manoa Samoan Language Program, Off Da Rock Tattoo (American Samoa), Tatau Manaia (American Samoa), Red Arbor Tattoos (Sioux Falls, SD).
Podcast
Cohosting a weekly science podcast (The Sausage of Science) have given me a good snapshot of the current field of human biology, so I started the Inking of Immunity podcast in 2019 to get the same familiarity with tattoo research. Our initial goal was to conduct fun, online collaborative research for a book by talking to researchers whose works we were exploring, but when COVID-19 hit, we extended our aims to exploring the breadth of tattoo research going in around the world. We currently try to produce 12 episodes annually of peer-to-peer tattoo research conversations with transcripts for accessibility and research use. The show is cohosted by me, doctoral student Mike Smetana, and evolutionary psychologist Becci Owens (University of Sunderland). Kira Yancey is our producer. Subscribe to the show on Soundcloud to hear new episodes when they come out or access episodes directly here when posted.
Select Media
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Our research has received a fair amount of press, though we take responsibility for our first press release, which provoked much of the subsequent click bait. We stand by our research findings that there is an association between tattooing and immune and endocrine functions, but we don't condone getting tattooed specifically to prevent illness. However, we have been pleased to see the flurry of spurious headlines were criticized as well. Other studies of tattooing and aspects of the immune system over the past few years have been integrated with other research in popular news articles that appear regularly. Following are selections from among local, national, and international news coverage of our tattoo and health research.
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