Temporary Tattoos and Tattooing with Ballpoint Pen

If you don't want to mark you skin with a tattoo that will last until the day you die but you would like to wear images on your body there are always temporary tattoos.

One way of applying a temporary tattoo is with a ballpoint pen. With it, tattoos can be made for recreational, decorative and commercial purposes. Ballpoint pen ink can be applied to the skin by an artist and it can be later washed off or left to fade away naturally through the body or from standard friction. Ballpoint ink is, as addition, non-toxic because manufacturing of pens and their ink is regulated in almost all countries which makes practice of temporary tattooing even more safer than standard. (There is one more connection between ballpoint pens and tattooing: prison inmates modify ballpoint pen components into tattoo guns but this is not the theme of this text).

One more type of temporary tattoo is henna tattoo. It is a traditional tattoo of in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh where a paste from a dried henna plant is dissolved in water, lemon juice, or strong tea and used for painting complex forms on skin of hands and feet. It is applied on the skin with a plastic cone or a paint brush and re-moistened with mixture of lemon juice and white sugar when it starts to dry to get a darker color. When the drawing is finished, whole surface is wrapped with tissue and left like that for 2 to 6 hours. After the tissue is removed henna will begin to dark from oxidation. This temporary tattoo will last from one week to three and is worn for celebrations, especially marriages. It spread around the world and is popular everywhere as a form of body art.

Temporary transfer tattoos or sticker tattoos are also (as their name says) temporary tattoos. They consist of paper that can easily be soaked with water and an image printed in ink that will separate from the paper when it is wet. When it was pressed on the skin wet like that and paper slowly removed, image would stay on the skin but it could be also easily removed. They appeared for the first time in late 19th century in boxes of Cracker Jack and were painted with food coloring so they were easy to transfer. In 1970s were sold in cereal boxes and inside bubble gum wraps. In 1980s were invented scratch-and-sniff sticker tattoos. Only problem of those early tattoos was that they tore up easily so they were improved in time. They lasted longer and their images were of better quality.

Airbrush temporary tattoo is one more solution for those who want interesting image on their skin – fast and without pain. These tattoos are of the higher quality (they look almost real) and are applied through a stencil on a skin. Airbrushes were invented in 1893 and since then used for coloring of a wide palette of things. Today they are used for tattooing. A stencil with a design is placed over the skin and fixed. Through the opening on a stencil, paint passes and stays on the skin. This kind of tattoo lasts from three to five days.