Historically, mothers have been known to tell their children all sorts of half-truths. The causal link between bread crusts and curly hair has yet to be established, and I'm pretty sure no one's face has ever "stuck like that". But here's something you mother never warned you about: Tattoos=leprosy magnets.

We were pretty lax about rules in my house, but that one would have been nice to have gotten a heads-up on. Before I got a tattoo, that is.

Call me sensitive, but the idea of skin lesions, nerve damage, and messed up upper mucosa sounds unappealing. I can assure you all that I was vigilant in ensuring that I was putting myself at no risk for blood-borne illnesses like Hepatitis and HIV, but this leprosy thing really blind-sided me.

Apparently, cases of "Tattoo Leprosy" (God, that is specific) have been observed amongst 20-something Indian women living in an area that is "highly endemic for leprosy," who got roadside tattoos from a lady who reuses needles. Demographically, this puts me pretty far outside the population at risk, but it never really hurts to make sure.

What the researchers suspected happened was that the leprosy bacteria, M. leprae, got trapped under the instrument, which was described as "a bunch of sewing needles tied together with a thread," and transmitted it from woman to woman.

All of the women had no history of skin lesions before the little ol' patch of leprosy showed up 10-20 years after the tattooing.

While this is upsetting, there are several reasons why I am an unlikely candidate for leprosy. They are as follows: we are in Grinnell. I watched my tattooist remove the needle from its package. I was not tattooed with "ink" made of soot from a lamp, and the artist was not an old woman who moves with her "tattoo basket" from one village to another.

Even when the process goes perfectly non-pathologically, however, a tattooee can expect to lose a layer of skin, leprosy-style. Wikipedia tells me that this is because the dye injected into the dermis activates an immune system response where phagocyte cells (translated from the Greek: cell eaters) engulf the pigment particles.

The epidermis flakes away, and eventually the engulfed dye becomes a part of the connective tissue due to collagen growth. The pigment hangs out in a layer of the skin "just below the dermis/epidermis boundary," where it is happy, but after many decades may venture deeper into the dermis, which is why it is hard to see detail in old tattoos.

And they do get old--ladies, remember: a tramp stamp is forever.

Well, kind of. Unsurprisingly, laser removal of tattoos has become almost as trendy as getting them in the first place. The good news is that it works OK in about 95 percent of cases. The bad news is that it can be really poisonous.

Most of the time tattoos are removed using Q-switched lasers that react with the ink in the tattoo and break it down so it can be absorbed by the body. The best-case scenario here is that the tattoo looks like it would if you sat in the sun for 40 years or so straight. Black is the easiest to remove, followed by blue, purple and red. Yellow is nothing short of evil.

Yellow no. 7 ink strikes back when you try to remove it from your skin. It breaks down into toxic chemicals that, when "attacked" by light, can eat your kidneys and liver.

Kidney and liver! What a scandal! It sure is a good thing I didn't get a big, yellow tattoo in India! I'm sure my parents will be sensible and thank their lucky stars I got a safe, kind-of easy to remove one in Grinnell. But still, maybe now isn't the best time to tell them about my tongue piercing.