Layers Of The Skin

Body Art

To Tat or Not to Tat?

Over the past couple of years, getting a tattoo has become something of a rite of passage in Brigid Beckman Schmidt 's family. It started when her son asked for a Lark Tattoo gift certificate for his birthday. Her other son was the next to get one, followed by her daughter. So perhaps it wasn't a big surprise when, for her 47th birthday, Schmidt's children chipped in to get her a tattoo.

"I had said, for probably five or six years, someday I might get a tattoo. I had been divorced for about a year. I traveled and wrote and landed on my feet again and that year, for my birthday, I threw myself a big party and my kids gave me a $100 gift certificate for Lark Street, daring me to put my money where my mouth was."

Schmidt knew exactly what she wanted. She chose three Chinese symbols representing dance, joy and warrior that had been painted by a local artist and which her son had framed as a Mother's Day gift. "They mean a lot to me," says Schmidt. "It's about my becoming a joyful, dancing warrior."

As tattoos have become more mainstream, a growing number of women -- many of whom had toyed with the idea of tattoos for years -- are plucking up their courage and getting ink done. They're all ages and come from all backgrounds, but most of them share one thing in common: They're getting meaningful tattoos for personal reasons to mark pivotal events in their lives.

"I love the way they look. I look for shirts that have a V in the back and shoes that show them off. I love it when people ask me what they are and what they mean. It's nice for me to tell the story," says Schmidt. "But I have them because I love them."

What to know before you go

Tattoo artists have a saying: "Good tattoos aren't cheap and cheap tattoos aren't good." If you're considering getting a tattoo, look for the best artist, not the best price, because it will cost you much more to remove a bad tattoo than it will to get a good one.

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Skin functions and structure

Every day you look at the skin on your body, but do you really know much about it.

Its the largest organ in your body and has five functions. It:

Regulates body temperature by controlling evaporation and conserving heat

Protects the rest of your body from the external environment and is the bodies first line of defence

Registers sensations hot and cold, touch, pressure, vibration and tissue injury

Excretes and absorbs, and

Synthesises vitamin D.

Structure

An average human has a surface skin area of between 1.5 and 2 square metres and without skin you would simply evaporate.

Skin holds 650 sweat glands, 20 blood vessels and more than a thousand nerve endings and has two layers.

The thicker epidermis, which is the outermost layer of skin and is the waterproof wrapping, is thinnest on the eyelids at 0.5mm and thickest on the soles of feet and palms of hands at 1.5mm.

As the epidermis does not contain any blood vessels, small capillaries that reach the upper layers of the dermis nourish the cells in the deepest layers.

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