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Ferromagnetic Tattoos

Comments

1. 

   ringdown

   
   December 2015
   Sorry about the thread necromancy, but this seems to be the main place to chat about magnetic tattoo ink.
   
   Turns out, you can get ferromagnetic particles in a tattoo to interact with a magnetic field, and if the magnetic field is big enough, it sucks for the person with the tattoo: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3445217/
   
   I was kind of hoping for a easy way to couple magnetic drivers to skin for haptics, but it looks like there's either an ohmic heating thing going on with the induced current (I imagine on a per-particle basis, rather than in loop circuits), or the field is actually dragging the ink within the skin and causing trauma that way.
   
   From the paper: "The authors further confirmed a ferromagnetic property of the tattoo pigment by documenting migration of the ellipsed skin toward a standard horseshoe magnet. They further studied the ferromagnetic properties of common tattoo pigments and showed that iron oxide–based pigments (most commonly black and brown) were displaced by a magnetic field, whereas carbon-, titanium-, and copper-based pigments were unaffected." So ferromagnetic ink is already a thing you can buy, and a normal magnet is sufficient to drag the skin holding the ink around.