Every tattoo buff will insist that getting some awesome new ink will always be worth it. But before you can wow your friends or family with some amazing body art, you’d have to first actually GET the tattoo. And then, given the nature of tattoos, themselves, you have to then let it heal up. So, just how long will it take for your skin & body to recuperate after getting a tattoo?

Here’s basically how tattoos work: your tattoo artist will use a mechanical needle to inject certain pigments into your skin, namely the dermis. The dermis is the layer of skin beneath the epidermis, which is the skin you can see from the outside. The ink applied to the dermis will then be visible through the epidermis. While the process gives you some cool body art to show off, it also leaves you with a plethora of tiny puncture wounds. And the full length of time it takes for your skin to recover will depend on both the size & the location of your tattoo. In the first week after getting inked, you’ll probably experience some redness & oozing, which is totally normal. Then, for 2 to 3 weeks after that you might have some itchy flaking skin. But usually, your skin should be back to normal within 2 to 3 weeks. Full healing for all the layers of your skin damaged by the process, though, can take up to half a year.

But, whether you’re getting an entire movie poster on your back or a lone symbol on your arm, injecting ink under your skin is technically a medical procedure. So, if your tattoo artist doesn’t give you a breakdown for aftercare (and not every state requires them to do so), at least now you know how long it should likely take for your body art to heal.

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The Olympics are underway now, with every athlete there striving to “bring home the gold” (as in gold medals). But, have you ever wondered: just how much is an Olympic gold medal really worth?

If the International Olympic Committee were still giving out solid gold medals to 1st-place finishers, those medals would be pretty dang valuable. But, after the 1912 Olympic Games, they substituted silver medals coated in gold. So, any Olympian today who might decide they want to melt their medal down & sell it for scrap isn’t going to earn as much as they might have back in the day.

The gold medals for this year’s Tokyo Olympics are made up of about 6 grams of gold on top of about 550 grams of pure silver. Like stock prices, gold & silver rates fluctuate pretty frequently. So, each medal’s value isn’t really set in stone. But, ballpark, it sits somewhere above $800. The online site Bustle estimated it at $830 back on July 13th, while another site, the National Post, said it was closer to $810 on July 19th. A silver medal, which is just 550 grams of pure silver, sits at $462, while the bronze medals, which are mostly copper & a bit of zinc, are only worth a few bucks.

But Olympic gold medals can be worth much more than just what they’re made of, and several athletes have sold theirs for far more than a measly $800. Back in 2010, Mark Wells, a member of the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” US hockey team, sold his gold medal to a private collector, who then auctioned it off for almost $311,000. Then, four years later, Mark Wells’s teammate, Mark Pavelich, scored $262,900 for his medal. And then, there are some medals that find their way onto the auction circuit way after their original owners have passed. For instance: in 2013, one of Jesse Owens’s gold medals from the 1936 Berlin Olympics sold for about $1.47 million.

So, if you can ever manage to snag one those Olympic gold medals, you may have a literal gold mine on your hands (albeit not solid gold).

Got a Mundane Mystery you’d like solved? Send me a message via social media (@AndyWebbRadioVoice), or shoot me an email at [email protected].

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