The young French designers from Appropriate Audiences hacked a 3D printer to make an automated tattoo machine.  The popularity of tattoosis at an all time high, so in order to give new tools and opportunities to the actual artists linked with new technologies, the crew adapted software produced by Autodesk to turn tattoo designs into digital files that can be downloaded to the machine. The machine is a mix of a Makerbot 3d printer and a tattooist’s needle, which is puncturing the skin up to 150 times per second.

The user can insert a body limb into the printer - for now designed for the arm - and the needle draws the design into their skin. Right now the designers’ goal is to make the machine more accessible for any part of the body, which then implies a specific architecture.

 The idea for the tattoo machine was born out of a workshop organized in 2013 by the designers’ school, ENSCI, a French leading school for industrial creation and design. Indeed, Pierre Emm, Piotr Widelka and Johan Da Silveira only used artificial skins at first; only few months later though they tattooed onto a real person's arm: a circle, which they described as "the perfect shape to test the precision of the process".