I was just poring over this thread and suffering the ‘wild-eyed-don’t-touch-me-I-wish-I-didn’t-have-to-wear-a-shirt-sunburnt-shoulders’ syndrome.
I remembered that I once considered getting a tattoo on my back, just on the shoulder where I am currently able to fry foodstuffs instantly with my awesome power of sunburn.
Say I had put a tattoo there. Say I was dumb enough to decide to get a big black blob o’doom tattoed there. Would I still have been sunburnt in the area underneath the big black blob o’doom? Or would it have changed the pigmentation of the skin enough to avoid it?
I recently heard a piece on NPR news about side effects of tattoos. If you get a magnetic resonance image (MRI,) your tattoo will cause a burn. If you have cancer surgery on an area near a tattoo, your lymph nodes will be black and look cancerous. They’ll be removed for biopsy.
All this is so you can swear allegience to a brand of motorcycle or the Marine Corps. That, or some Arabic lettering that might say, “Foolish American Tourist!”
I saw an episode on Mythbusters about the MRI thing. They put a tattooed guy through the MRI and nothing happened. Apparently, there is an ink that contains iron pigments, which is affected by the MRI but not enough to burn anyone. And nothing happens with the rest.
Buckler: I don’t think getting a tattoo will help with sunburns any, since the stuff that protects your skin is melanin and I don’t think there’s any in tattoo ink. Not that I know much about this sort of thing.
I have had exactly two sunburns in my olive complected life. In June, I got sunburned on my legs. I have a tattoo on each ankle and both were sunburned. Thank goodness I don’t peel or that would have been might unattractive. My tattoos were just really, really itchy (like when they were healing, but I could actually scratch them this time).
Getting a tattoo sunburned will fade your tattoo and make it look older faster. It can also bleach out some of the paler inks. I have a dolphin tattoo on my breast and sun exposure completely bleached the white ink. Now I use waterproof sunscreen of the highest SPF I can find on my tattoos whenever I’m going to be in the sun.