Laser Tattoo Body-Modding, This Time it’s Not Painful: Fingernails

The skin-ablation laser tattoo we showed you recently was creepy mainly because burning your naked skin is going to hurt, but this new laser body-mod tackles a safer target, fingernails. The portraits of famous bods you can see in the image are laser-etched into black nail polish (I know, it looks like they’re made of seared, blackened nail, but they’re not), and member lamedust over at Instructables has got a pretty comprehensive guide. So if you’re crazy, you too can etch pics onto the end of your digits. The video makes for interesting watching.

So, all you need is some artwork, a laser-etch machine and the urge to burn your fingers. Or, if even that’s too creepy for you, the technique also works on artificial nails.

And I know the headline says “not painful”… but if you check out the Instructables link, you’ll see that’s not strictly true. Aligning laser and nail and avoiding sensitive skin is sometimes not so easy, it seems… as is not cooking your nail because the laser intensity’s too high. Watch it, and promise me not to try this body mod either? I’m pretty sure the lid should be down and all safeties engaged on these machines, for a reason. [Instructables]