I have used IFT for nearly 40 years and never come across this. Many patients these days have tattoos and I have never had a problem. I even treated my daughter in law when she was having laser treatment to remove a tattoo and IFT increased the healing rate and decreased the pain for her. I have seen patients with burns from IFT (also medico-legal Expert cases) and we have had a few in the practice. They were caused by new physios and students not ensuring good contact or patients turning up the intensity to see how high they could get it even after being instructed as to the right low level sensation. It is interesting to note that I have only ever seen one woman with a burn. I think I would strongly dispute the ink theory based purely on clinical experience of somewhere in the order of 150,000 treatments carried out with IFT. In my experience, it is down to poor contact of the electrodes; intensity too high, or some insulating material on the skin eg some skin creams, or as in one medico-legal case where the physio had put the foot in a wax bath first and not removed all the wax before applying the IFT. Was it only one electrode that caused the burn? Were there others over the tattoo? Some years ago now, I was involved in investigating the incidence and type of burns. Notably, they all were the same size and nature - a small circular blister - regardless of the size of the electrode. At that time, we wondered if the problem was putting the electrode over an acupuncture point, which are points of lowered skin resistance, but given the number of acupuncture points on the body, you would expect there to be a much higher incidence of burns. I would put my money on poor contact of the electrode.