Tattooed to Survive: The Cancer Ink Irony No One Talks About
How tiny radiation bullseyes and trendy full sleeves might quietly invite the very disease you thought you’d beaten. Read this before your next tattoo… or radiotherapy session.
At the beginning of what I fondly call my Cancer Treatment Greatest Hits Tour, a nurse leaned over my ravaged chest and asked, with the casual air of someone offering sugar in tea, “Fancy a few tattoos today, Chris?”
Now, before you imagine a majestic eagle across my chest or ‘Mrs G’ romantically etched on my ankle, let me clarify…I have eight tattoos, each no bigger than a pinprick, strategically dotted around my torso like a drunk toddler’s connect-the-dots game. Their sole purpose? To help the radiotherapy team aim their giant death-ray machine at exactly the same bit of me every single session. Precision is king when you’re nuking tumours, apparently.
Fast forward two years later… I’m a cancer survivor still proudly sporting eight faded specks of permanent ink, each one a tiny, cancer-risking love letter to medical accuracy. The irony here is so thick you’d need a bone marrow transplant to remove it… trust me, I’ve had one.
We cancer patients, already busy collecting surgical scars and half-finished eyebrows like they’re trendy festival wristbands, also get handed a tattoo or eight; even though it’s been known for ages that injecting ink under the skin can, wait for it, cause cancer. Marvel at that contradiction for a moment… we radiate the cancer, we slice the cancer, we chemo the living daylights out of the cancer, then we jab more cancerous chemicals back in for good measure. It’s like fixing a leaking tap by drilling a hole in the roof.
Before you think I’m overplaying it, allow me to present Exhibit A: a fresh Swedish study has just confirmed that tattoos bump up your risk of blood cancer… lymphoma, to be precise; by a neat little 21 percent. For the uninitiated, lymphoma messes with your white blood cells, which are basically your body’s bouncers, chucking out germs and other riffraff. Except, when they go rogue, they multiply faster than the excuses people give for not attending your charity bake sale.
The study, carried out by diligent Swedes (who, incidentally, also gave us IKEA, so you know they’re serious about building complicated things), looked at thousands of people. They discovered that whether you’ve got a discreet butterfly on your ankle or Post Malone’s entire facial doodle collection, the size of your inked real estate doesn’t matter. Your immune system still throws a tiny, permanent tantrum, which can snowball into cancer. Just great… Beautiful in fact!
Now, let me stir in an extra absurdity for flavour, imagine you’re a woman, bravely surviving breast cancer, enduring a mastectomy, and then, as part of reconstructive wizardry, having a brand-new nipple tattooed on the very area where the cancer once threw a party. I fully understand the need to feel whole again, heaven knows, losing body parts is traumatic enough, but does nobody pause to wonder if injecting potential carcinogens into the same postcode as your former tumour might be, I don’t know, medically daft?
Meanwhile, somewhere on the internet, a red alert flashes for red ink in particular. Turns out, that pretty scarlet hue might contain delightful extras like cadmium, mercury or iron oxide; all of which are about as welcome in your bloodstream as a rat in your sourdough starter. Experts suggest picking a ‘naphthol’ red instead. Because obviously, nothing says ‘responsible life choice’ quite like needing a chemistry degree to order a safe tattoo.
So here I am, a middle-aged guy, half-bionic from surgery, who’s outlived cancer, but still sporting cancerous ink dots because, back then, nobody could be bothered to draw on me with a Sharpie each visit instead. Eight tiny specks that shout ‘survivor’, but whisper ‘potential new patient’.
Let me get another thing straight. This isn’t about scaremongering, or pretending your edgy sleeve tattoo means you’re guaranteed to develop lymphoma. It’s about common sense, something I fear modern healthcare sometimes leaves in a jar by the reception desk, right next to the hand gel no one uses properly.
If you’re considering inking your entire torso to look like a comic book page, fine. Just do your research. If you’re a cancer patient about to get radiotherapy, perhaps politely ask if they can aim their multi-million-pound radiation cannon without adding a carcinogenic dot to your skin. We send robots to Mars but can’t figure out a sticker?
So, here’s my empowered nudge; question it. Ask awkward questions. Refuse anything that sounds daft. After all, surviving cancer once is heroic. Doing it twice because of an inky dot? That’s just careless.
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Chris Geiger, Author of The Cancer Survivors Club.
Daily Dose of Disbelief!
Bsky: @chrisgeiger.com
Bsky: @thecancersurvivorsclub.com
Bsky: @dailydoseofdisbelief.com
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