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• $49 for one hour of tattoo service ($150 value)
• $139 for three hours of tattoo service ($450 value)

Tattoos: Art Buried Beneath the Skin

Though applied in a matter of minutes, tattoos can last for years. Check out Groupon’s exploration of how your new ink stays in place despite your body trying to erase it.

A new tattoo is vibrant and sharp, its colors popping against the skin like fresh paint. With proper care, tattoos can stay like this for years. That’s because tattoo artists don’t simply apply the ink but bury it, carefully injecting insoluble pigments about 1 millimeter deep into the skin’s second layer—the dermis—and bypassing the upper layer—the epidermis—completely. Prone to flaking skin and big brothers’ rug burns, the epidermis has a high cell turnover, which makes it too volatile for tattoos to stay put. The much less fragile dermis is able to hold ink in place for decades.

Over time, however, tattoos do fade. Sun exposure is a major culprit, but so is the human body itself. Tattoo ink is, after all, a foreign substance that our bodies want gone, much like viruses or clothes. Slowly but surely, the immune system gradually begins to break pigment down into manageable pieces that the lymph nodes can carry away. This process varies depending on ink color—lighter, brighter colors are broken down more easily, and thus they tend to wane well before darker blues, blacks, and greens.