Getting a tattoo is not a decision to rush into without thinking things through. After all, it’s no walk in the park to get ink out of your skin after you’ve had it injected by way of thousands upon thousands of needle punctures. At least it isn’t easy right now. PhD student Alec Falkenham at Dalhousie University is working on a cream that he thinks will be able to remove an ill conceived tattoo without further abusing your skin.

Tattooing has been around in one form or another for thousands of years. While the modern practice relies on electric tattoo machines that jab you with needles at high speed, the basic principle is the same as it ever was — a sharp object punctures the skin and deposits a small droplet of ink. Do this enough times and you can draw solid lines and shapes. The cellular process that occurs during the healing process is what makes the ink stick around for decades and also what enables Falkenham’s process, known as bisphosphonate liposomal tattoo removal (or BLRT), to supposedly wipe the skin clean.

When ink is introduced by a tattoo machine it ends up in the epidermis (which peels off during healing) and the top few layers of the dermis. As with all foreign material, this elicits an immune response. On the front line of the immune system are macrophages, giant white blood cells that gobble up anything that seems like it shouldn’t be there. That is, anything that isn’t you. Some of the ink is carried out of the skin by macrophages and into the lymph nodes, but most of it remains trapped inside macrophages and fibroblasts (skin cells) that become part of the healed matrix of connective tissue. That’s why tattoos are forever.



To get that ink out, you have to destroy these cells with ink locked up inside. The current leading method of doing this is with a laser that introduces sufficient energy to destroy the target cells. Not only is this process even more painful than tattooing, it can take many treatments and a lot of cash. BLRT can apparently accomplish the same task without causing damage to surrounding skin. The key is those inky macrophages embedded in the skin. Rather than heating them until they burst, BLRT delivers a drug that kills the cells without harming surrounding tissues.

When the cream is applied to a tattoo, the active compounds absorb into the skin where they encounter the macrophages left over from the tattooing process. Just as the macrophages originally consumed the ink particles, they will pick up the newly arrived particles and sign their own death warrant. The macrophages die and a new wave of macrophages spring into action to remove the debris. Falkenham believes that after enough applications, the ink from the original tattoo could be mostly cleared. Early estimates suggest weekly applications for a few months, but lasers aren’t particularly fast either.

Falkenham is testing BLRT in the lab right now and plan to begin trials on pigs that were tattooed with ID numbers at birth. If all goes as planned, human trials could begin in a few years. So for the time being, think hard about your trip to the tattoo parlor.