Cleaning the Tattoo Machines

As a senior tattoo artist who have seen too many pros and cons towards tattoo art and its implementation tools – tattoo machines, if you are insisting on requesting me to spout out reasons why there are so many reservations about tattoo art, I would surely comment that one of the usual referred factors is, in many conservative and suspicious people’s opinion, tattoo machines are one of the device which are highly likely to transmit diseases by cross infection through blood.  

Cleaning tattoo machines is a very important process in tattoo practicing. Certain parts of the tattoo machines which get a chance to closely approach the individual customer’s skin should be disposable after one time use, such as needles and ink one round in the tube. There is no need for you to clean needles, for they must be thrown away after severing off each customer. Every tattooist should get their whole new tattoo needles for the practicing, by which way will maximally shut down the likelihood of transmitting any diseases.

Tattoo machines are not like other appliances you could wash dust from. Bacteria are not like dust cleanable by warm water. For the long use tattoo machine parts, frame, tube, grip, tip, and such things, you need to take professional sterilization devices to kill the invisible germs to eyes for the cleaning.

Usually, there are two specific cleaners for tattoo machines cleaning, autoclaves and ultrasonic cleaners. Ultrasonic cleaner is a handy and common device which could thoroughly sweep out the entire left tattoo ink even those hided in the narrow corners or the dead angles. Better still, by using ultrasonic cleaner it won’t do any chemical damage to the tattoo machines. However, although ultrasonic cleaner does strongly perform on killing Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus, it is not able to wipe out HIV; the bacterium witch can be only killed by autoclave sterilizer. At this point, autoclave sterilizer is the only professional tool for tattoo sterilization.

Cleaning tattoo machines is not only for the beautiful appearance of the machines, but also for the long run of the tattoo artists’ practice. Please do highly value this important process for booming your career if you set mind to be a good tattoo artist.