Summary: Sterilizing a tattoo needle requires extensive cleaning, scrubbing and soaking before bagging it and putting it in an autoclave to completely sterilize it. Find out why many tattoo artists prefer single-use needles with helpful tips from an experienced tattoo artist in this free video on tattoo equipment.
Chip Taylor has traveled extensively throughout his 19-year tattooing career, and he spent many of those years working on the east coast at some of the best studios. Such studios...read more
"Things are different than they were when I first came on in this business, when you would use a needle more than one time. Now an instance, if you were doing a tattoo at the end of the night, say you have done four or five jobs and you would go to the cleaning room, take the needles out of your tubes, scrub them down good with a brush and some cleaning solution. They would soak in some solution for a bit, then you would eye loop them make sure they were still in good condition, bag them and re-autoclave them. Well, these days with the changing of times and the much more disease going around these days, you have to be a lot more particular than that and most folks use and prefer a single-use needle. And you can buy them through many different companies, some make better needles than others and I won't go into that with you, but you can get 50 needles to100 needles fairly reasonably priced and it just cuts out a lot of hassle having to go through the hassle of taking them out of the tube and cleaning them every night. So you just buy your pre-sterilized needles, use them one time, chuck them away. Now your tubes that your needles ride in, that has to be cleaned and autoclaved each and every time you use them. So, once you get done, once you - every tattooer should have an abundance of tubes, maybe you should have to clean and sterilize maybe once every week or so, but you must scrub the tubes, the barrels, the tips, inside and out. Get all the excess ink off of them, bag them in your sterile bags and put them in the autoclave and cook them for the prescribed time and the prescribed pressure and heat. This is a tube that's already been sterilized. You can see it's inside the packet. There's an indicator on the back, once it's been through the cycle, this little indicator here will change colors. I think it starts out blue then it changes to a very dark gray or black. And this tube has been used, but it also has been cleaned, scrubbed out, soaked, dried, bagged and autoclaved. So, now, it's ready to go. And in my box up here is where there's a solution where you soak them in between. When you get done with a tattoo, you take the machine apart, you put the tube up in your soaking solution and then when you've got them to a point where you feel like you need to clean them, you take them back to the room and scrub them out and bag them."
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