Your Next Tattoo Won't Hurt. The Pain Was the Point

Pain was never the decoration on a tattoo. Pain was the receipt.CipherX has worked out how to skip it. Ferdinand Kohle co-founded the London biotech startup after training in Innovation Design Engineering, the joint Royal College of Art and Imperial College London program. On July 23rd, at a launch event in Shoreditch (of course it was Shoreditch), CipherX invited visitors to receive a permanent tattoo with no buzzing needle and no bearded man named Dax. A trained technician presses on a small adhesive patch. You wait. They peel it off. Congratulations: you now carry a permanent decision on your body, delivered with all the ceremony of a nicotine patch.They're called Microdot Tattoos, and per CipherX's own FAQ they use "ultra-fine, microscopic structures (smaller than 1 mm)" to penetrate the upper layers of skin and deposit pigment. I'm sorry, but a millimeter is not microscopic. The product photograph makes that plain: a heart drawn in needles, ranked in rows, visible to the naked…