Mobile phone company Nokia has filed a patent for a novel new alert system: a tattoo that vibrates when you have an incoming call or text.

The haptic tattoo would use ferromagnetic ink that would respond to a magnetic field created by your phone, transferring a "perceivable stimulus" -- aka a vibration -- to your skin. Custom vibration patterns could be applied to different alerts, the same way most phones let you assign custom ringtones for each of your contacts.

In case you don't want to go under the needle, the patent also covers a "patch" version of the technology that uses a stick-on strip of magnetic material rather than tagging users with permanent ink.

The patent was first filed last September, and it's not clear how close Nokia is to bringing this tech to market.

[slashdot]