BrainStuff Classics: How Do Tattoo Machines Work?

forty have at least one tattoo. So our question for the day is how do tattoo machines work? And yes, the preferred industry term is tattoo machines, not tattoo guns. As it turns out, the technology used to apply tattoos hasn't changed all that much since the eighteen nineties. Before then, tattoos were given by tapping or just coaking needles into the skin by hand. But at the turn of the

twentieth century, two groundbreaking patents were filed. Each is basically a motorized array of solid needles connected to an ink reservoir. When the needles pierced the skin. The tips pull ink from the reservoir into the skin and deposited there. This happens because of surface tension and capillary action, you know, the way that water will stick a little bit higher up to the sides of a glass than its level in the middle. The close set needles of a tattooing

device act the same way, pulling the ink down. Some of it gets trapped in the skin and eventually forms the tattoo. But let's look at these two different machines, which we should note probably weren't the first of their kind ever used, just the first to be patented. First, we've got New York City tattoo artist Samuel O'Reilly's rotary machine, patented on December eight He based the design on an electric pen patented by Thomas Edison in eighteen seventy six.

The pen would punch through paper to create a stencil of your writing, and O'Reilly realized it could just as easily punch through skin to create a tattoo. O'Reilly's motor is a rotary type, meaning that when electricity is applied, a flywheel spins a cam which pushes a follower to convert the spinning motion into a reciprocating linear motion of

the needles. Basically, the needles move up and down. It's called reciprocating motion because every push down rotates the flywheel with enough force that it will keep spinning just enough to pull the needles back up to their starting position, ready to be pushed down again. This lets the needles move up and down very smoothly and rapidly, applying the tattoo more easily than most artists could manage via the traditional poking method. However, this machine probably isn't what you

think of when you think of tattooing. Imagine the soundscape of a tattoo parlor in your mind's ear. Do you hear a deep, piercing buzz. Well, that's the noise made by a coil tattoo machine, the second design we're going to discuss today. The first patent for it was granted on August twenty three, nineteen o four, to Charles Wagner. He was another New York City tattoo artist who based his device on an Edison electric pen, this one driven

by electromagnetic coils. These coil designs lean heavily on other machines. From the eighteen sixties and seventies telegraphs, doorbells, and dental pluggers, which were used to push gold into cavities. Believe it or not, the idea is simple. You attach a group of needles perpendicular to an armature bar. That bar is spring loaded so that it can vibrate up and down.

When it's in its up position, it completes a circuit in the machine that sends electricity through dual electromagnetic coils and that create it's an electromagnetic field that pulls the bar down, which breaks the circuit and releases the bar back to its up position, starting the cycle over again. Since the tattoo needles are attached to the bar, the

vibrations push and pull them up and down. Lots of innovators have built on these concepts, making tattoo machines safer, more precise, and less painful for both the client and the operator, and artists use a few other mechanical designs too, Rotaries and coils are just the most common. Today's episode was produced by Tyler Clang and written by me for

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