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Your nerves feel pain.

Your nerves run from your brain, down your spine.

All down your spine, branches of nerves come out into your body, so you can feel that part of your body.

So that your arms can feel, a big nerve runs through your armpit, down along your elbow (your funny bone) and into your hand.

As it runs, this nerve branches like plant roots into your arm and up to your skin.

When tattooing in the sparse, root end areas, you feel less pain.

When tattooing in the dense, root branch areas, you feel more pain. All the nerves in that branch are activated at once.

I love thos answer but I have a follow-up :

Would the dense and sparse areas be so close together on my forearm. It was literally 1 or 2 mm difference in pain levels.

Yup!

A picture would do it better justice, but basically the bigger nerve bundles are deeper in the skin, so they mostly activate when you're right over them

Thanks again. I am now off to confuse myself by looking at nerve maps.

Haha they legit look like plant roots wrapping around a person

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