3D printer becomes tattoo artist

Three French students turned a 3D printer -- a MarkerBot Replicator -- into a tattoo machine. France's Cultural Ministry challenged people to transform, in a matter of eight hours, images and sounds in the public domain into something completely different.

The event was hosted by ENSCI les Ateliers, a famous design school in Paris. Pierre Emm, Piotr Widelka and Johan Da Silveira used this opportunity to hack the MarkerBot 3D printer and, from a bank of images, create a tattoo of a perfect circle (with a pen) on their volunteer. They purposefully chose a circle to demonstrate the machine's precision, compared to a real tattoo artist who would have difficulty drawing the perfect geometrical shape.

The contest was over but these three students were determined to actually make their idea come to life.

"The young designers didn't want to stop there. They wanted the machine to make REAL tattoos, on REAL skin, so they kept working on the project during their spare time, with some help from teachers and other students," their website Instructables explains.

They borrowed a manual tattoo-machine from an amateur tattooist and practiced getting the robot to etch the design on artificial silicone skin.

"The big difficulty was to repeat the same exercise on a curved surface and on a material that has much more flexibility than silicone," Emm told NPR.

Eventually through exploring different methods of keeping the skin taut, including a metal ring and plastic bands, they decided on a tube with an open area where the skin was to be marked. In the end, the young inventors successfully tattooed a perfect circle on a volunteer's skin.

They reconfigured the MarkerBot, a machine that costs less than $3,000, to "make the machine more incarnate," Emm describes.

3D PRINTER X TATTOO MACHINE / EP 02 from appropriate audiences on Vimeo.