Tattoos have been a universal phenomenon throughout the world for thousands of years, transcending cultural transformations and technological shifts. As the art continues to evolve, it has now taken steps into the nonfungible token (NFT) space in a bid to maintain relevant in an increasingly digital world.
Known as Bang Bang in the tattoo industry, Keith McCurdy is one of the artists who hopes to merge the ethos of tattoo culture with disruptive technologies. He’s using a new type of rewriteable tattoo ink that appears and fades away under different lighting conditions.
Over the past five years, Bang Bang said that scientists at the University of Colorado have developed a tattoo ink made of photochromic microcapsules, a technology dubbed “tech tattoos” that leaves a color-changing mark that is activated by UV light, thus changing the tattooed image as it reacts to UV light. He sees the technology as a way to bridge tattoo culture’s desire for individuality with the provable uniqueness of NFTs. Back in June, he sold the first rewritable tattoo as a 1/1 NFT for 100 ether (ETH), or nearly $100,000 at the time.
McCurdy told Cointelegraph:
“Our digital identity will become very important in the future. It may already be more important than our physical identity today. Individualization in a digital world and defining one’s identity is what we do…
