When you get a tattoo, you’re likely doing it under the assumption that every tool and bottle of ink being used is sterile and bacteria-free. That may not be the case.

The FDA has confirmed the findings of previous studies that found roughly one-third of tattoo ink jars and permanent makeup ink contained living bacteria that could potentially end up stabbed into your skin with a needle.

The FDA’s new findings combined results from four previous investigations conducted between 2018 and 2024. Overall, 35.4 percent of the unopened inks contained bacteria. Even products that were labeled as sterile were not sterile, as 30.5 percent of 118 supposedly sterile samples were contaminated.

Researchers identified more than 250 bacterial isolates representing 94 species, including 34 classified as potential human pathogens; some of them included Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which can cause severe infections in people with weakened immune systems, and Bacillus cereus, a bacterium that is often associated with food poisoning.

FDA Researchers Found Bacteria in More Than a Third of Tattoo Inks

To be clear, this doesn’t mean that one-third of tattoos are going to lead to an infection. The study doesn’t say that any of these contaminated products can actually make anyone sick. All it’s doing is demonstrating that bacterial contamination is widespread enough that an infection arising from any of these inks could possibly be explained by the ink itself and not because the tattoo artist didn’t follow proper procedure.  

For as much as the researchers have looked into contaminated tattoo ink, they still don’t know exactly how or when the contamination happens. They found no consistent patterns that reliably predicted whether a bottle of tattoo ink, whether it was labeled as sterile or not, was actually contaminated.

Feel free to get that tattoo you’ve been planning, but do it knowing that this entire industry wherein ink is permanently etched into your flesh with a needle should probably have a bit more oversight during its manufacturing process than it currently has.

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