Rose Rimler

So I really want to know, is this true or is this just BS?

Yeah.

Very curious to know what you found.

So, you know, obviously tattoos have been around thousands of years, but interestingly, scientists have only recently began to study how the tattoo ink interacts with our biology.

This is kind of on the newer side of things.

Scientists like Santiago Gonzalez.

He is a toxicologist and immunologist at the University of Lugano in Switzerland.

Here's what happened.

Santiago needed to label mice for an experiment they were doing about the immune system.

The way they had been doing that was putting a tag on the mouse's ear, like tagging their ears, which is very common.

So instead of tagging their ears, the scientists in his lab decided they were going to try tattooing the animals in order to like mark them.

Is it like teeny tiny?

So they're chugging along, tattooing their mice to do their next experiment, which all seemed to work fine.

But then something unexpected happened.

Oh, gross.

And just as a reminder, lymph nodes are structures in the body that are part of the immune system.

They filter out lymph, which is a fluid that comes from the blood.

So Santiago's team was looking at one of the lymph nodes in the mouse's leg near its foot, which is what had been tattooed.

And they found that it got stained with the tattoo ink.

Okay.