The vision of the HTC is to perform, publish and disseminate to stakeholders: high quality research elucidating potential epidemiological and causal relations between tattoo size, location on the body, and pigment quality, with positive, neutral, or negative health outcomes.
What is explicity not part of our vision:
The HTC by design and purpose is a collaboration by not more than 30 hand-picked experts at any point in time. This demarcated size is to optimize interactions and prevent group logistics of hampering agility. External academics can apply for membership, should openings develop.
"My research is driven by a simple question: how do the choices we make in everyday life shape our long-term health, often in ways we do not yet fully understand? Tattoos are a striking example - deeply personal, widely accepted, and increasingly common, yet still surrounded by scientific uncertainty.
Tattoos represent the intersection between culture, identity, and biology. What we choose to place in our skin does not stay confined there; it becomes part of our bodies for life. This raises important questions, not only about individual safety, but about population health when millions of people are exposed.
My interest lies in bringing clarity to this space: to understand how tattoos interact with the body, and what this means for long-term health.
Within the Healthy Tattoo Consortium, I aim to help build a knowledge base that supports both individual choice and safer practices - so that tattoos can remain a form of expression that does not come with unintended consequence."
Prof. Jon Laman , UMCG, immunologist:
" As an immunologist, I have a longstanding interest in lymph node drainage. How do pathogens and viruses reach the lymph nodes that drain the skin, the brain, and the gut? The lymph node (of which we have hundreds) is the essential meeting place where T and B lymphocytes are activated by presentation of pathogen fragments (antigens). Only when the lymphocyte with the correct specificity meets an antigen presenting cell with the corresponding small part of the pathogen, a protective immune response develops. A playful metaphor for the function of the lymph node is a singles bar, where only a meeting of complementary minds leads to a meaningful outcome.
Hence, my interest in tattoos is based on mechanistic questions how large and very small particles of tattoo pigments reach the lymph node and affect its function. Immune cells literally eat (phagocytose) particles such as tattoo pigments, but they cannot digest them. What are the functional outcomes of this frustrated phagocytosis for a person with a tattoo? Is it neutral, positive (better immune response), or even dangerous (inflammation, promotion of cancer types)?
These large questions are being addressed by our Healthy Tattoo Consortium, with the ultimate goal to promote tattoos that are medically safe.
Recent scientific research indicates that tattoo ink may have significant long-term effects on the immune system, potentially increasing the risk of certain cancers. See National Geographic article "What to know about the link between tattoo ink and cancer risk"
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