One patient’s rash
In January of this year, a string of unusual patients began to trickle into dermatologist’s offices in Rochester, NY. They had red rashes on areas where they had recently had tattoos, and the usual treatments were not working.
The cases, 19 in all, were reported to the local department of public health. A team there learned that all the patients had developed the rash, which turned out to be a bacterial infection, within three weeks of getting a tattoo at a particular parlor. When they interviewed the tattoo artist, they learned that he had recently begun to use a new kind of grey ink. Such ink is often used to create shadow effects, and indeed, the patients’ rashes tended to be on the areas where the grey ink had been injected into their skin.