Rose Rimler

But a few years ago, she got curious about potential toxins in tattoos.

I'm just laughing because... Yeah, yeah.

Yes, she's very relatable.

So she decided to learn Chinese.

No, no, she didn't.

She decided to look into tattoos and health.

She zoomed in on cancer for the reasons we talked about before, the potential carcinogenic ink.

And also, we know that chronic inflammation can lead to cancer.

So she dove into that beautiful Scandinavian public health data that we love so much here at Science Versus.

So she and her team decided to focus on two types of cancer that they could see plausibly being connected to tattoos.

Skin cancers, including melanoma.

It's kind of obvious.

But also lymphoma, that's cancer of the lymph system.

And so they pulled the records of everyone in Sweden who had been diagnosed with those cancers between the ages of 20 and 60.

And then they set out to find who among them had tattoos.

And they also gathered a group of like matched people who did not have cancer, sort of like matched controls.

And they sent out questionnaires to them as well.

A lot of lifestyle stuff, but also like lots of questions about tattoos.

Not just like do you have a tattoo, but how many do you have?

How big is it?