The technology, which is described on MIT's website and will be presented in full at a wearables symposium next month, is called DuoSkin. The researchers say you can design a circuit using any graphic software, stamp out the tattoo in gold leaf (which is conductive to electricity), and then apply other commodity materials and components that would make the tattoo interactive.

The paper presents three key use cases for the tattoo: you could use it to turn your skin into a trackpad, design it to change color based on temperature, or pull data from the tattoo. In one photo shared by MIT the tattoo even includes LED lights, creating a kind of glowing display on the skin.

This isn't the first time researchers have tried to turn our "dumb" epidermis into the equivalent of a touchscreen. Back in 2010 a Carnegie Mellon student, also in collaboration with Microsoft Research, came up with something called Skinput, which was designed to turn your wrist or the back of your hand into a "gestural finger input canvas."