My first Tattoo is this: Why are hundreds of people with broken-off pencil tips in the skin

Kids can be cruel. Mostly on purpose, sometimes Accidentally. And a select few around chose among us, carry the evidence even today, as a more or less clear mark of a wild Childhood. We speak of into the skin ingrown the tip of a Pencil. It happens faster than you think: a funny-intentioned attack to the person sitting next to you in elementary school, one awkward movement – zag, sharpener pricks the skin, the Mine stops.

Twitter user @Los_Writer that runs even since primary school times, with a dark spot in the palm of your hand around, started a call on the messaging platform: Who, except him, lives in fact, since she was a child with a visible pencil tip in the skin? He posted:

The reactions were overwhelming. Countless people sent @Los_Writer your pencil-accident-stories and the proof photos. “My first Tattoo”, jokes about a user @isabelisabel102 and shows a picture of your index finger. Others have been caught on the knees, ankles, feet, face or even the abdomen. Many write that you can carry the pencil-marks for more than 30 years.

The Twitter user @rxdaughter posted a photo of your ring finger to the dark mark to see. “For 21 years, after my girlfriend from the seventh grade stabbed me,” she writes.

Susan Kirkness contributed a particularly frightening photo of one of your eyelid. “Here’s mine! Left Eyelid! No idea how I have managed to have the eye! It happens in elementary school,” she writes.

“I pricked myself on, even in the knee … in the eighth grade, I don’t know how it happened,” writes Allan Guthrie.

As normal, the dark gray stain for those who run around with it for many years, so daunting and fascinating is the phenomenon of ingrown the tip of a Pencil sounds for all who are not affected and never a witness to a relevant accident. How is that even possible? We have asked this question to the dermatologist, Dr. Peter Mohr.

“If a pencil tip penetrates into the body and breaks off, the body tries to eliminate these foreign bodies. This can happen by applying to the foreign body from the site of entry out of the fester,” said the doctor, chief physician at the Elbe clinics, Buxtehude. “Not that happens, this remains the foreign body or in the skin in the body and is attacked by immune cells,’. This is not ,however, dissolve a pencil tip’, so that it comes around to the whereabouts of the foreign body, possibly with a granuloma – immune cells, and connective tissue around the foreign body.”

To the stuck tip, just in the skin, however, is not the best approach. “In General, you should try to remove the pencil tip. You can do this yourself, it can be done by a doctor,” says Dr. Mohr. “There is no emergency, however, is the indication.” You can provide a pencil of injury, and self, “the wound should be disinfected and the bandage are changed regularly. Should there be a redness in the area and to a suppuration, however, is visit necessarily a doctor,” advises dermatologist.

Who cares that the pencil lead toxic lead enters the body, can breathe a sigh of relief: “The ingredients of a pencil are not made of lead but of graphite,” explains Dr. Peter Mohr. “In General, it is a carbonization of brown or hard coal. Of a harmfulness of this graphite, which can be in the Form of a pencil tip in the body, has not been reported up to now.”