What would you do to show how much love you have for your favorite thing in the world?
Build a statue? Make art to immortalize the things they love? Many choose to carry a piece of their favorite things, places, and people in the form of a tattoo—inked into their skin as a permanent reminder.
One woman has taken her love for Red Bull to the next level. She tattooed the barcode for her favorite beverage on her forearm, as reported by several outlets, including ap7am.com.
It’s more than just a simple tattoo. It’s functional, as the barcode was done accurately enough that it is able to be read by a scanner at the grocery store.
Why did she get the barcode tattooed?
As reported by ap7am.com, the Swiss woman, Dyu, got the barcode tattooed on her forearm for roughly $600 U.S. dollars. The tattoo includes the barcode for the Red Bull can and a caterpillar or another insect taking a bite out of the corner.
The caterpillar is an addition based on a sketch by the woman’s sister, according to ap7am.com.
As reported by the online outlet, Dyu confirmed she holds an “ardent love” for the beverage.
Pubity posted a video of the functional tattoo in action. In the TikTok, which has 9.4 million views, Dyu is at a self-checkout machine trying to buy a Red Bull. She opts to scan the barcode on her arm rather than the can itself.
@pubity No way 😭🤣 #RoadTo18M #Pubity (Via @collab ♬ original sound – Pubity
Why does the tattoo work on a scanner?
Dyu said that even her tattoo artist had doubts about the tattoo being scannable.
“The tattoo artist did not guarantee it would work, so I wasn’t sure either,” Dyu is quoted saying by ap7am.com. “But the next day, I tried it at my workplace, and it scanned. I was really surprised and happy.”
A barcode tattoo requires a high level of precision in order for it to work.
Barcodes use a mix of parallel lines and spaces between them to correspond to data about a product. The measure of space between each line has to be just about perfect for a product scanner to correctly register what item it is meant to correspond to.
So Dyo’s tattoo artist was pretty dang talented.
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