[delecti]

Neat concept, but the density of needles seems quite low for tattoing, and that is likely why the linework of the tattoos in those pictures is so blurry. While getting tattooed, the needle will puncture skin and deposit ink typically 1500+ times per minute. The most specific that this article gets is saying the patches have "hundreds" of needles. At the high end (999 needles in a patch) this means that this patch has substantially lower resolution than a single minute of being tattooed.

So, it's a neat gimmick, but it'll need a lot of work to be much more than that. It'd be neat for some small pieces to fill space I guess.

And a bit of a tangent, but I also have a pretty strong needle aversion, and I have not found that getting tattooed "feels" like there are any needles involved in the process. I know logically that it is a needle, but subjective process (the pain and visuals) really bears no resemblance to a needle.

[therealpygon]

Makes you wonder why; if we can cut steel in half with water, would it be possible to deliver ink to a specified depth with high pressure “ink needles” (microscopic high pressure short burst of liquid ink)? Like a super high pressure inkjet printer.

Though, I assume a more practical point might be a robot that would have an ink-feeding extremely fast cycling device for doing tattoos that can complete them in a fraction of the time. Would suck for artists if you could just AI design your tattoo and have it done in minutes by a robot that can sense your movements and reactions and adjust in real time.

[sawjet]

You can't cut steel in half with water. Waterjet cutting requires an abrasive media like garnet to cut through hard materials. Water is simply the power source that accelerates the garnet to Mach Jesus.

[therealpygon]

Plain water can cut through aluminum and other thin metals at pressure, and human skin probably isn’t harder than that, but that’s a good clarification for those who are unaware of the additives commonly used for harder materials like steel/thick aluminum/etc. and it was my mistake to say steel originally. Thanks for pointing it out.

[psd1]

My guess is that pressure-blasting the ink will not be more comfortable than driving it in with a physical needle.

Maybe this belief comes from being a sysad - dot matrix printers never did me no harm, but inkjets are demonic.

[delecti]

We used to do some injections via jet injector. That was before my time, but the testimonials I'm seeing online say that they weren't painful.

[chocrates]

It feels more like a fork scraping a sunburn for me, than repeatedly stabbed with a needle