YouTube channel Smarter Every Day initially brought us the fascinatingly disgusting slow-motion video of getting a tattoo.
Well now they're back and they're showing the other side of it, getting a tattoo removed, using lasers.
It's an incredible process when you think about it. Tattoos essentially only exist because the granules that you put beneath your skin are too big to be broken up by white blood cells.
Well the only way to get rid of a tattoo is to disintegrate those granules into much smaller chunks, small enough that white blood cells can then engulf them.
The rest is basic biology with your liver doing the rest of the hard work to then process that 'alien' material.
While that sounds easy enough there's a catch, and the catch is that the only way to destroy those granules effectively is with an ultra short-pulse laser.
The video is fascinating and shows everything from the science behind it to the act of actually having your tattoo disintegrated.