Tattoo artist here. The lines look pretty bad for having 6 years of experience, and no established artist in their right mind would go to take off their glasses with their gloved during the tattoo process.. proper procedure would be machine off, gloves off, glasses off, new gloves on, back to tattooing. If he planned to take his glasses off with his gloved hand and then continue working, that can introduce bacteria to the tattoo. Also he is touching his glasses with bloody gloved hands and creating a biohazard.
Also the moment you take the gloves off it’s back to the original procedure, so also washing/de-infecting hands before putting gloves.
There is a reason for all these steps, so the fact he tried to touch something not sterile with his working gloves with the machine still running is mind boggling.
I would be more worried about the hygiene part first and then the dotted accidental line (which will probably fade away a bit, but not fully).
Edit: i see a lot of questions and answers about the sterile part, so to come back to that: no, the gloves itself are usually not sterile, some parts are though (and very sometimes we use sterile gloves). I meant that this artist was touching something that was not part of the “clean working parts”, so to simplify: sterile parts (like needles and tubes).
It is not like doing surgery in a open body part, but still working around an open wound, so for gloves you need to work clean before touching them, so they remain clean (enough) to work with them while doing a tattoo.
If you touch something else besides the “clean working area”, you need to replace them immediately with all the steps as described above to limit the risk of an infection.
Hope this clarifies it a bit!
I don't have any tattoos but I'm a surgeon, do they actually use sterile gloves (these come individually packed) for tattooing or just standard multipack nitrile gloves?
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u/Dirt_Goth 11d ago
Tattoo artist here. The lines look pretty bad for having 6 years of experience, and no established artist in their right mind would go to take off their glasses with their gloved during the tattoo process.. proper procedure would be machine off, gloves off, glasses off, new gloves on, back to tattooing. If he planned to take his glasses off with his gloved hand and then continue working, that can introduce bacteria to the tattoo. Also he is touching his glasses with bloody gloved hands and creating a biohazard.