Risks of floating with a tattoo? – DSP 55

Should you allow people with fresh tattoos to float? How fresh is “fresh”, anyway? Graham and Ashkahn share their experiences.

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Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)

Graham: And welcome. Our question for today is “if someone comes in with a relatively fresh tattoo, what do you do?”

Ashkahn: What do you do about the tattoo, huh?

Graham: What to do about the tattoo?

Ashkahn: Well, I mean, this one seems pretty straightforward. Well, relatively fresh, I’m assuming, is within a few weeks of them getting it?

Graham: Right. Yeah, yeah.

Ashkahn: What you do is don’t let them float.

Graham: All right. We’ll see you next week for …

Ashkahn: That’s pretty much it.

Graham: So, it gets confusing, though, when it does get up to that three, four, five weeks point.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: It can depend not only on the size of tattoo, but even how deep it went and how much concrete line work you had versus shading, stuff like that. So, once again, telling them to consult the expert in their field, which in this case is the tattoo artist who gave them the tattoo, is totally what you should do. They shouldn’t be floating until their tattoo artist says that it’s all right to.

Ashkahn: Yeah. Our general, like anything less than about six weeks is where I would still have some amount of concern. Around that four to six week mark is where things seem kind of to be on the safer side, but then the problem’s not for you. Nothing’s gonna happen to your float tank if someone gets in there with a tattoo that’s not properly healed.

Graham: Yeah. You’re not worried about the ink getting into the tank or some bloodborne bacteria getting in-

Ashkahn: The tattoo rubbing off.

Graham: Yeah.

Ashkahn: Now there’s a tattoo on the bottom of the tank, just stuck there.

Graham: So, yeah, you are very much just worried about the person’s experience and their tattoo, and not causing any damage to it. It can happen. I’ve definitely heard at least one really terrible horror story of someone who had a relatively new center, and they left one of their staff in charge of it, and the staff didn’t know to turn the person away who had come in with the tattoo, and it was several weeks old, and they were like, “Oh, it’ll probably be fine.”

So, the floater went in and comes out really soon, after 10 or 15 minutes or something, and it was way too painful to actually stay in the tank. But the worst of that is was that even that small amount of time in the float tank, the saltwater had already kind of irreparably damaged the tattoo, to the point where the center owner had to pay to have an actual coverup expert, tattoo expert, come in and fix the tattoo. So, even more expensive than the initial regular tattoo work.

I’m sure it also sucked for the person with the tattoo, because now they’ve had to get it twice, and it didn’t end up exactly how they wanted it in the first place, so just a terrible, terrible situation all around. So, it’s one of those things where you just don’t want to take chances on it.

Ashkahn: Yeah. Yeah, that sounds, that does not sound like a great situation.

Graham: No. It was an unfortunate call to get one day, yeah.

So, just say no.

Ashkahn: To tattoos. Yeah.

Graham: Just say no to the tattoo. All right. Short episode for today, but no worries, because we’ll be back tomorrow. And if you have any questions in the meantime that you want answered, just go to floattanksolutions.com/podcast and we will answer them.

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