Where does tattoo ink go in your body? There's one particular spot.
Tattoos are no longer taboo. One in every three Americans now has at least one tattoo. As getting inked becomes more common, potential risks and side effects are being more intensely scrutinized. Last year, a series of worrisome headlines suggested a link between tattoos and lymphoma. These scare stories were based on a study of 1,400 people with lymphoma and a control group of over 4,000 people without cancer.This study’s authors claimed that their study showed that getting a tattoo increased risk, but their data actually suggested that any differences were not statistically significant. If tattoo ink did cause cancer, you’d expect people who had more of their body tattooed to be at greater risk. Crucially, the authors did not find this. Even if the data were more convincing, the study’s format makes it impossible to tell whether any link is causal–there could be factors that make people more likely to get lymphoma and tattoos.These health risks were overblown, but the study got me th...