What kind of fingerprint

There are many times in life where you need to be fingerprinted. Most often, it involves the background check for a new job. In the state of Maryland, people wanting to legally purchase and own a gun must be fingerprinted first. If you'd like to travel out of the country and need a passport for the first time, you'll be fingerprinted.

Of course, if you are arrested you'll be fingerprinted too. Have you ever stopped to think about why? Fingerprint identification is one of the most important criminal investigation tools due to two features: their persistence and their uniqueness. The friction ridges which create fingerprints are formed while inside their mother's womb and grow as the baby grows.

The only way a fingerprint can change is through permanent scarring, which doesn't happen very often. To date, no two people have ever been found to have the same fingerprints—including identical twins.

In addition, no single person has ever been found to have the same fingerprint on multiple fingers. As new skin cells form, they remain cemented in the existing friction ridge and furrow pattern. In fact, many people have conducted research that confirms this persistency by recording the same fingerprints over decades and observing that the features remain the same. Analysts use the general pattern type loop, whorl or arch to make initial comparisons and include or exclude a known fingerprint from further analysis.

To match a print, the analyst uses the minutiae, or ridge characteristics, to identify specific points on a suspect fingerprint with the same information in a known fingerprint. No two fingerprints are the same. Find out what kind you have! Materials Non-toxic ink pad Light-colored balloon you also can use paper Magnifying glass optional Directions Roll your finger from side to side in the ink pad.

Press your finger, flatly and firmly, on the deflated balloon. Lift your finger off without smudging the ink. Blow up the balloon. Examine the ridges of your fingerprint, which has expanded on the balloon. Therefore any pattern that contains two or more deltas will be a whorl.

In this pattern a consistency of flow can be observed. It starts on one side of the finger and the ridge then slightly cascades upward. This almost resembles a wave out on the ocean and then the arch continues its journey along the finger to the other side. The plain arch pattern is the simplest of the fingerprints to discern. The similarity between this pattern and the plain arch is that it starts on one side of the finger and flows out to the other side in a similar pattern.

However, the difference is that the tented arch lies in the ridges in the centre and is not continuous like the plain arch. They have significant up thrusts in the ridges near the middle that arrange themselves on both sides of an axis. The adjoining ridges converge towards this axis and thus appear to form tents. These loops are named after a bone in the forearm known as radius that joins the hand on the same side as the thumb.

The flow of these loops runs in the direction of the radius bone i. These loops are not very common and most of the times will be found on the index fingers.