Have you ever wondered how tattoos stay put for your whole life with little fading and discoloration? Your immune system actually helps keep tattoos in place. In order to understand how the immune system works with tattoos, you first must understand how tattoos are made.

In brief, tattoo artists create tattoos by injecting ink into the skin with a drill. In your skin, the top layer is the epidermis, and the layer below that is the dermis. The ink is injected into the dermis.

Courtesy: http://health.howstuffworks.com/tattoo.htm

In order to keep the ink in place, your immune system takes over. Phagocytes literally “eat up” the ink, thinking it is foreign material.  The phagocytes envelop the ink to contain it. When the skin heals, the ink-containing phagocytes are kept in place by granulation tissues and dermal fibroblasts. As a result, the ink stays for years on end.