If you have tattooed wrists and are thinking about ordering an Apple Watch, you may want to try one first. A Reddit thread is reporting that the watch can fail to read heartbeats, or even fail to detect skin contact at all, on some people with heavily-tattooed wrists. This has been backed-up by some Twitter users.
The issue isn’t affecting everyone with tattoos, and reports seem to suggest that solid areas of darker inks – like red and black – and most likely to be affected. The issue is specific to tattoo inks: skin color has no impact.
If the watch fails to detect your skin, you can turn off wrist detection in the companion app, but the watch will then no longer support Apple Pay. The person who started the Reddit thread also reported that notifications no longer arrived without skin contact detection, something I’ll be testing this evening when wearing it outside a cycling jacket.
Can only be a matter of time before someone tries to blow this up into #tattoogate …
Photos: Left, Guinne55fan; right, Luc Vandal
