How Do Tattoo Machines Work?

Tattoo machines (sometimes called guns) haven’t changed much since the 1890s because they’re such elegant devices. Tune in to learn how the most common types work.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works? A brain
stuff it's Christian Sager. If you like art, permanence or
shallow wounds, you may have a tattoo or I don't
know seven and you're not alone. A Harris pull from
indicates that here in the US almost fort of adults

(00:23):
under the age of 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

(00:45):
just poking needles into the skin by hand. But at
the turn of the twentie century, two groundbreaking patents were filed.
Each is basically a motorized array of solid needles connected
to an ink reservoir. When the needles pierce the skin,
the tips pull ink from the reservoir into the skin
and deposit it there. This happens because of surface tension

(01:08):
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

(01:32):
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

(01:52):
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

(02:15):
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

(02:37):
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

(03:00):
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,

(03:22):
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

(03:43):
electromagnetic coils, and that creates 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,

(04:07):
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. Check out
the brainstuff channel on YouTube, and for more on this

(04:27):
and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.