• Posted March 6, 2025

Tattoos Might Increase Risk of Lymphoma, Skin Cancer

People put a lot of thought into getting a tattoo – the design they desire, the location they prefer and the message their body art will send to others.

Most don’t think about the impact their tattoo might have on their long-term health, but perhaps they should, a new study suggests.

Tattoos appear to increase a person’s risk of skin cancer between 33% and 62%, according to a new Danish study in the journal BMC Health.

Results also indicate there's increased cancer risk from larger tattoos.

Tattoos larger than the palm of a hand more than double a person’s risk of skin cancer and nearly triple their risk of lymphoma, or cancer of the lymph nodes, researchers found.

When tattoo ink is injected into the skin, ink particles can migrate to and accumulate inside the lymph nodes, researchers said.

“We can see that ink particles accumulate in the lymph nodes, and we suspect that the body perceives them as foreign substances,” researcher Henrik Frederiksen, a clinical professor at the University of Southern Denmark, said in a news release.

“This may mean that the immune system is constantly trying to respond to the ink, and we do not yet know whether this persistent strain could weaken the function of the lymph nodes or have other health consequences,” he added.

About 32% of Americans have a tattoo, and 22% have more than one, according to a 2023 poll conducted by the Pew Research Center.

For this study, researchers analyzed data from an ongoing study of Danish twins. They compared nearly 2,400 randomly selected twins born between 1960 and 1996, as well as 316 twins where one twin had been diagnosed with cancer.

“The unique aspect of our approach is that we can compare twin pairs where one has cancer, but they otherwise share many genetic and environmental factors,” senior researcher Jacob von Bornemann Hjelmborg, a professor of biostatistics at the University of Southern Denmark, said in a news release.

By comparing tattoo patterns alongside cancer diagnoses, researchers found that people with tattoos have a higher occurrence of both skin cancer and lymphoma.

The analysis showed that tattoos larger than the palm of a hand increased skin cancer risk by nearly 2.4-fold, and lymphoma by 2.8-fold.

This rate accounts for a person’s age, when they got their tattoo, and how long they’d been followed in the study.

“This suggests that the bigger the tattoo and the longer it has been there, the more ink accumulates in the lymph nodes,” lead researcher Signe Bedsted Clemmensen, an assistant professor of biostatistics at the University of Southern Denmark, said in a news release.

Previous research has suggested that certain pigments in tattoo ink might be less healthy than others, but this study found no clear link between cancer and specific ink colors, researchers said.

“We know from other studies that ink can contain potentially harmful substances, and for example, red ink more often causes allergic reactions. This is an area we would like to explore further,” Clemmensen said.

Researchers next plan to focus on how ink particles affect the lymph nodes, and whether certain types of lymphoma have a stronger link to tattoos than others.

“We want to gain a better understanding of the biological mechanisms — what happens in the lymph nodes when they are exposed to ink particles over decades? This can help us assess whether there is a real health risk and what we might do to reduce it,” Clemmensen concluded.

More information

Penn Medicine has more on tattoo health risks.

SOURCE: University of Southern Denmark, news release, March 3, 2025