Keeping an eye on your tattoo is a must...
Doctors have started to warn people to keep a close eye on any tattoos they may have on their body, even decades after they get inked up.
The warning comes after a woman in Australia was sent to hospital suffering from enlarged and painful lymph nodes in her armpits.
The lymph nodes were filled with black ink and had been caused by an immune system reaction to the ink in her tattoos.
She had got one of the tattoos that developed the node when she was 15-years-old and although they were feared to be cancerous, a biopsy discovered that the condition was benign.
Initially, doctors at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital were concerned that the lumps in her armpits could mean she had lymphoma and they have warned that it could have been solely down to the "large black-ink tattoo that had been present for 15 years which covered her back.
“We concluded that the diagnosis was granulomatous lymphadenitis, which was probably a hypersensitivity reaction to tattoo pigment,” the doctors reported in the
Annals of Internal Medicine.
A recent study in 2017 showed that new tattoo ink can travel to the lymph nodes.
Recently, findings by the group at the Annals of Internal Medicine suggested that the ink can travel to the lymph nodes and potentially cause cancer, even in the oldest of tattoos.
In Ireland, up to 36% of people younger than 40-years-old have at least one tattoo and many of their first pieces of art come between the ages of 16 and 20-years-old.
