Real Inked Project: card game made of 52 tattoos
In the “Real Inked Project”, 52 people have had a playing card tattooed on them. Now, the tattoos are to become a tangible card game.
Marijan Jordan and Gerhard Muthenthaler have already invented many things, for example their company Erfinderladen, the Day of Inventors and a quartet game. Naturally, this one is about inventors. Their latest idea is the “Real Inked Project”. For this, 52 people have had a playing card tattooed on them, on their arms, chests and other places. The tattoos are now to become a real card game.
The idea came to Jordan and Muthenthaler during the corona pandemic in July 2020. “After we had to close the Erfinderladen because of corona, we had time to implement our own idea,” says Jordan. Almost two years later, in June 2022, the “Real Inked Project” is almost complete. Currently, Jordan and Muthenthaler are raising money on Kickstarter for the production of the card game. According to their own statements, they need just under 9,600 US dollars and have so far raised just under 5,150 US dollars. Anyone who wants to join in has to pay 29 euros. In return, they get 52 colourful playing cards in a black box. As a bonus, there are two jokers on top.
52 playing cards, 52 designs, 52 styles
Jordan and Muthenthaler support people in implementing and marketing their ideas. They check the potential of an invention, handle intellectual property rights and help find investors. The entrepreneurs know how to present ideas. Nevertheless, the reactions were subdued when the two presented the “Real Inked Project” to others. “As consultants, we often told founders: you have to go all in, there’s no guarantee. So we had the first two cards tattooed on ourselves. That was the right way to break the ice,” says Jordan. “We’ve produced and launched card games before, but what we were planning here was already incredibly crazy before production. We’ve given up almost everything.”
The only requirement for the participants was the size, colour and rank of the card. The rest was left to the artists or the models. The result is playing cards from all over the world, including China, New Zealand, South Africa, the USA, South America and Europe. As varied as the countries, so varied are the designs: on the ace of clubs, a parrot preens its feathers, the queen of diamonds is missing her right eye and on the two of spades, snakes are writhing.
External content (player.vimeo.com)
Of course, Jordan and Muthenthaler didn’t come up with the idea of getting game-themed tattoos. If you look around online, you’ll find countless tattoos featuring board and card game designs. Some of these photos were posted years ago, for example of Tichu tattoos, Talisman tattoos or ‘7 Wonders’ tattoos. And naturally, there’s also a game on the subject: Tattoo Brawl. But turning tattoos into a card game is indeed an unusual approach.
Tattoos and health
The health effects of tattoo inks in the body are disputed or not yet fully clarified. ‘Some tattoo inks contain allergy-triggering substances such as nickel or problematic azo dyes. Allergic reactions to red tattoos have been particularly common,’ write the Verbraucherzentralen. Black inks, which often contained the soot-based pigment ‘Carbon Black’, were frequently contaminated with carcinogenic aromatic hydrocarbons. Sunlight on a tattoo can also lead to health issues. Since January 2022, more than 4000 harmful substances in tattoo inks have therefore been banned or restricted in the EU. The Bundesverband Tattoo has criticised this. The problem is that some of these laws were drawn up without input from the industry. As a result, the regulations do not improve consumer protection. Instead, they create frameworks whose consequences for consumers offer worse protection than before. There is a risk that the ban could lead to the use of inferior tattoo inks, for example from abroad.