This hub discusses the future of tattoos. Google Ads may be coming to a forehead near you.

One of the problems with tattoos is that they are permanent, and you are stuck with them if you don't like them. Another problem is that your body has a limited amount of space on which to display your body art, so you have to be selective about the tattoos you choose to adorn your skin.

Choosing the right tattoo, one that you will display proudly for the rest of your life can tricky. But now, there is a new type of programmable tattoo that solves both problems: if you don't like you tattoo, you can simply change it. And because you can change you tattoo, the same area of skin can display an entire gallery of tattoos.

An inventor has been granted a patent for changeable tattoos. The system works by inserting carbon nanotubes beneath the skin, which are then arranged into a pattern using electromagnetic fields. What this means is that the ink beneath the skin can be rearranged to display different tattoo art.

So if you got a tattoo that reads "John and Helen" forever but forever didn't last quite as long as you thought, you can just rearrange the ink to display the name of your current significant other, forever or until the next best thing comes along.

Another approach would be to apply so called digital ink to create digital tattoos. Digital ink is composed of nanospheres that can be manipulated and aligned using electrical fields. This technology is aimed at developing digital newspapers which can display different text, just like a computer monitor, but on paper.

The same digital ink technology could be used to create digital tattoos, that can be changed at will. Because of the versatility of these programmable tattoos, they could be used either as body art or for commercial ends.

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Programmable tattoos could be used to turn people into human billboards, displaying the ever-present Adsense ads on their forehead. Biometric sensors and bluetooth technology could tell Google what you are looking at or feeling at the moment and display appropriate contextual ads!

Instead of body art, this invention could lead to the human contextual ad. Just click here! Instead of websites, we would have meatsites, displaying useful information and of course Adsense ads. Those wanting to fully monetize their bodies would do well to remember that "content is king" and display relevant information, such as the daily news, in order to draw viewers. This could open up a whole new world to SEO consultants, who for a small fee could teach you how to position your meat billboard to get the best position in the search results.

If you think that this sounds farfetched, then read the story a Utah woman who agreed to have her forehead permanently tattooed with the url of internet gambling site GoldenPalace.com for a mere $15,000. It's her forehead for God's sake! And she only got $15,000 in exchange for a lifetime of stares and whispers as she goes through life as an oddity fit for a carnival sideshow!!

If this trend continues we will see more anre more people "monetizing" their foreheads and other body parts with ads. It won't be long before Google figures out to dominate this market by as it did the web.

Of course Google would then counter by publishing rules to prevent spamming. So cross linking or associating with bad neighborhoods would be discouraged, and you if you did not want your website, I mean meatsite, banned from the Google search results. And what exactly would deletion of a meatsite -- you -- mean?

The more I think about it, the scarier this technology sounds!