How to personalise a gift of a chef’s knife (or any type of kitchen knife)? Blade tattooing is the answer…

When you’re looking for a gift for someone, the ability to personalise that gift makes it extra special – it’s pretty much the exact opposite of giving a gift voucher.

Many gift companies offer personalised versions of their products featuring well, whatever words you want to appear, often simply the name of the recipient or perhaps a short phrase that would mean something to them.

The downside is that it generally requires a little more planning than just going into a shop (or ordering the standard item online) – personalised gifts generally take a little longer to arrive and are a little more expensive than the standard model.

Today the range of personalised gifts is mind boggling – from photos printed onto a vast array of different products, from mugs to caps to pillows.

Gifts made of metal, for example cuff links or drinking flasks or – yes – knives, are generally either engraved or etched. There is a difference between these two techniques (that we were blissfully unaware of)…

Engraving

Engraving as a way of cutting a design into a hard surface (such as glass, silver, gold and steel) dates back a very long way – the oldest engraving discovered is an engraved shell found in Java in Indonesia that has been dated back to around 500,000 years ago.

From around 60,000 years ago there are plenty of examples of shells, bone and ivory with engravings on them. Harder materials such as metal items have been found with engravings from around 3,000 years ago.

Technically engraving is done by cutting a design into something with a ‘burin’ (also called a ‘graver’) by cutting lines into the object. Today’s modern handheld devices, in the right hands, are capable of cutting very accurately – up to 40 lines within 1 millimetre. There are of course now a number of machines that are used to engrave, such as roll stamping or roller-die engraving machines as well as computer aided engraving machines.

Etching

Etching can achieve a very similar result as engraving but is a very different process – it involves the use of acid on the metal. Examples of etching have been found that date back five thousand years, but the technique only overtook most uses of engraving in around the 1500s, simply because it was an easier process to use.

Just to throw more confusion into this summary, modern laser techniques can be either laser etching or laser engraving. Laser engraving in fact cuts a small hole (or series of them) in the surface material, whereas laser etching removes a top layer of the material rather than cutting through it. A fine point!

The main practical differences are that laser engraving machines need to operate at a much higher temperature than laser etching machines and that the depth achieved by the process is greater in engraving than in etching – maximum engraving depth is around 3mm, with etching this is 0.25mm.

When applied to knives, the process of engraving/etching (primarily etching, of the laser variety) is – again a little confusingly – called ‘knife tattooing’ or ‘blade tattooing’.

If you Google ‘knife tattooing’ or ‘blade tattooing’, or in fact any combination of these words, you’re unlikely to find any examples of knives with tattoos, just humans with tattoos of knives. But take our word for it, this is what the process is called in knife circles.

And why are we telling you all this? Well it is of course because we now offer knife tattooing on our range of I.O.Shen knives.

So if you’re looking for a Christmas gift for a special person who loves preparing great food, maybe a special ‘tattooed’ knife is the way to go?