The 3D Printer that can give you a TATTOO

A group of students have modified a 3D printer to prove that robots can tattoo humans too.
One volunteer is the proud of owner of what is thought to be the first tattoo etched by a machine – a perfect circle on his forearm.

A group of three French design students modified a MarkerBot 3D printer as part of a challenge set by France's Cultural Ministry, which challenged people to remix images and sounds in the public domain.

The event was hosted by ENSCI les Ateliers, a famous design school in Paris and the students set about creating tattoos from a bank of images.
Pierre Emm, Piotr Widelka and Johan Da Silveira had eight hours to make use of their digital materials and managed to hack the printer so that it could draw a perfect circle on skin, using a normal pen.
They chose the circle to demonstrate the precision of the technology as however good a human tattoo artist is, circles are incredibly difficult to draw accurately.
Despite the official challenge being over, the students were determined to create their tattooing machine for real.
They borrowed a manual tattoo-machine from an amateur tattooist and practiced getting the robot to etch the design on artificial silicone skin.
‘The big difficulty was to repeat the same exercise on a curved surface and on a material that has much more flexibility than silicone,’ Mr Emm told NPR.
The students explored different methods of holding the skin taut where the tattoo was planned, including a metal ring and elastic bands, but finally settled on a tube with an open area where the skin was to be marked.
They did not find it hard to find a brave volunteer eager to gain the accolade of having the first robot tattoo.

The Instuctables.com website documented the process in detail and has published the instructions to help people transform their own 3D printers into robotic tattooing machines.