Tattoo Machine: Power to Design on Human Body
Before a tattoo machine was invented, people used electric pens designed by Thomas Edison which were made for some other purpose i.e. as a device to be used for duplication but later, Samuel O'Reilly discovered that the same pen can be used to introduce ink to the skin of human body. Reilly's machine was based on the technology of Thomas Edison's device known as tattoo rotary, but with improvements in technology, we use electromagnets in a tattoo machine.
Tattoo machines are basically classified into 5 types, namely, rotary tattoo machine, coil tattoo machine, liner tattoo machine, shader tattoo machine and color/saturation machine.
The rotary type of machines used the technology of electric motors used to drive the needles. Due to improvement and up gradation of technology, electric motors are now replaced by pneumatic machines.
Electromagnetic circuit is used in the coil tattoo machine, to rotate the needle. There are many variants for this coil of machine right from single coil to triple coil machines but those considered as standard are the dual coil machines.
The liner machine is used to introduce ink to the skin for making a bold line in one pass. The short contact circuit allows the machine to take high rotations.
The shader machine is used to include black ink and its gradient. We can also use color with this machine but it fails to provide good quality because of the low saturation level. The contact circuit gap here is more than the liner because slow rotations of the needle are required here.
Finally, we have the color machine which has good saturation level to bring out bright colors. The color can be blended and high quality output can be seen. The speed of needle rotation is very slow since it has a bigger contact circuit gap as compared to the previous types.
