Good questions!
Yes, your body is constantly regenerating itself, at least some parts of your body.
Your skin is made up primarily of 2 layers, the epidermis (the colored skin on the surface) and the dermis (the support structure of your skin). Between these two layers is a layer of cells called the basal keratinocytes. These cells generate billions of new keratinocytes skin cells every day and the epidermis is constantly regenerating. Each day, as new cells are made, yesterday's cells get pushed further up to the surface. It takes an average of 42 days for a cell to go from its birth day at the basal keratinocyte layer to the top. By the time the cells are at the surface of your skin, they have aged and are dead. On the average, there are about 40 layers of dead skin cells on the surface of an adult's skin. This is called the stratum corneum.
The dermis is the support structure of your epidermis. This is made of many things (such as collagen, elastin, proteoglycans, hyaluronic acid, etc.) This level of the skin does not regenerate itself. This is the level where all the aging occurs. All the sun damage we get from our training builds up in this layer and is cumulative.
The reason tattoos do not "slough off" is because they are engulfed by our macrophages (immune cells) and stay in our dermis. The deeper the ink is in the dermis, the more resilient is to with lasers. The dermis we die with is the same dermis we were born with, only much more degenerated from all the sun damage we get throughout our lives. Since tattoo ink lies in this structure of our skin that does not regenerate, it is permanent. This is one of the reasons why amateur tattoos are so easy to remove; many amateur tattoo artists do not place the ink as deep as professional tattoo artists.
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