Who should we thank for modern tattoo machines? Thomas Edison!
The tattoo machine owes its origins to Thomas Alva Edison. However, he didn’t intend to build a machine to make tattoos. His original invention was something called Stencil-Pens that was intended to be a duplicating device, aka to write out the same thing multiple times.
In 1891, a man named Samuel O’Reilly modified Edison’s machine to introduce ink into the skin, and later added the tube and needle to provide an ink reservoir. Modern machines are very precise and can even control depth, speed and force application making tattooing the artform that it is today.