Planning on getting a new tattoo is always exciting, especially in the initial phases. Searching for beautiful designs, deciding whether it will be coloured or classic black and grey and then finally you sit down with an artist and actually get it inked onto your skin.
Now your new tattoo is all finished, wrapped up, ready to go and you find yourself outside the tattoo studio asking yourself: “how do I take care of a fresh tattoo?” Well, you’re not the only one who failed to research tattoo aftercare, in fact, this is really common mistake. Most of us spend a lot of time searching for tattoo designs or making a design from scratch and looking for the best tattoo artist, but fail to study or at least have an idea about how to take care of a fresh tattoo. Remember, no matter how beautiful your fresh ink looks, if it isn’t taken care of properly, it could get infected. This could ruin the design and you’ll end up going back for a touch up and repeating the process all over again.
Taking care of a fresh tattoo is really not that difficult. The key is to be familiar with tattoo aftercare. Now a fresh tattoo is considered an open wound. This means the protective barrier of the body, the skin, is broken and foreign bodies like bacterium or a virus can freely enter and infect the wound. But wound care for a tattoo is totally different.
With regular wound care, it is ideal to keep the wound dry, so that a thick scab forms quickly for fast wound healing. A scab functions as a temporary barrier while the wound heals, this is to prevent any infection from invading the wound.
For tattoo wound care it’s a different story. We want a thin scab to form, and we want to keep the wound moist. Keeping the scab moist is very important to keep it soft so that the tattoo design doesn’t get ruined when the scab falls off.
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