Sitting in an event space at Imperial’s White City campus, I wondered if it was wise to get inked by a man with only one visible tattoo. Every other needle to graze my skin has been wielded by people who are absolutely covered — face and body — in their own work. The only body art I could spy on Ferdinand Kohle, co-founder of tech company CipherX and co-creator of the new “painless” Microdot Tattoo device, was a tiny 010, in honour of the company’s numerical name.
The Microdot Tattoo was born out of an interaction Kohle had with a very tattooed friend. Kohle, who has a lifelong phobia of needles, gestured to the friend’s arms and asked him: “Why can’t we do all of that, but with no pain?” As a materials scientist with expertise in injectable medicines, Kohle could have easily thought of himself as the immediate answer to his own question. “But I thought, ‘If it’s able to be done, someone will already be doing it,’” he told me, bashfully.
