What do you get when you mix a jar, some bed bugs, and an entomologist? A temporary tattoo, of course! Not your cute run of the mill bubble gum temporary tattoo applied with water either. It’s filled with a thousand or so bed bug bites. A lot of people think that bed bugs bite only at night. This is in fact a myth. They are more active at night, but will bite any time of day.
Entomologist Johnny Fedora works at Colorado State University and came up with this tattoo idea.
This is what he has cleverly named his “tattoo gun.” It is a glass jar filled with around 1,000 bed bugs. Hungry and just waiting for a little warmth to grab their attention so they can go in for the bite. He made the lid porous and in the shape of a rabbit.
Here is a close up of a bedbug in all its glory. They are small, about the size of a poppy-seed. They are pretty clever. They will inject the animal or human they are feeding off of with a numbing chemical so the host doesn’t feel them sucking their blood. It’s been described as more of a tickle. This is definitely a tickle that isn’t funny.
Matt took a picture of his arm about two hours after the bites. You can clearly see the rabbit.
But after 24 hours, it looked a lot worse. By then the swelling had set in and it was pretty red and miserable looking.
At 48 hours, the body’s immune defense has taken care of a lot of the swelling and you can see the rabbit start to take shape again.
After 72 hours, the swelling and pain is pretty much gone and just the rabbit remains.
Two weeks later, there is not a trace of the temporary tattoo.
Check out the video below to see exactly how this terrible bed bug tattoo works.
Come to find out, Johnny is not the only person to do this. If you search online, you can definitely find others. Personally I’ll take a real tattoo over this method any day.