Not everyone still loves their tattoos 20 years (or even 20 minutes) later
What Were You Inking?! True Stories of People Who Regretted—and Removed—Their Tattoos
Halfway through getting her palms tattooed, Long Island mom Angela Sarro realized: This was a big mistake. She was getting the red and blue pills as seen in the movie The Matrix, one on each palm—the red representing a yearning for truth, even if it’s disturbing, and the blue guaranteeing blissful ignorance.
“I looked down and started crying,” says Sarro. The red one looked like a jelly bean. She asked the artist to stop. “And he said, ‘Nope. You already paid. You’re getting the blue one too.’ ” Blissfully ignorant, but soon to learn the disturbing truth, she went along with it.
A few weeks later when her son started fourth grade and his new teacher waved at her, “I was too mortified to wave back,” says Sarro. She didn’t want anyone seeing the blobs on her hands. “They weren’t even the same shape!”
As the weeks went on, “I would clutch my hands into fists so much that my fingers would ache and I would have to unwrap them at the end of the day,” she says. But the self-doubt went even deeper than the ink. “Was I a bad mom? What kind of person am I? It really makes you wonder a lot of things about yourself, like: Why did I get this impulsive thing in the first place? What does it tell everyone around me about my judgment?”
Desperately Googling to see if she could undo what she’d done, Sarro found a national chain of tattoo removal parlors called Removery. They not only had a branch in Manhattan—they were hiring! She went in for a consultation and a job interview at the same time. When the manager asked why she might want to work there, she said, “Because I understand what everyone is feeling. I get it.”
And today, two years later, with her palm tattoos almost completely gone, you’ll still find her at the same Removery location. Now she works there as a tattoo removal consultant, advising fellow ink-regretters what tattoos to remove and how.
And the job description, frankly, sounds a lot like a therapist. For her patients, “there can be a lot of tears,” says Sarro, and, most of all, a past that must be addressed.
And it must be a past they’re desperate to forget, because the process isn’t cheap. At Removery, prices are by the inch: Complete removal of 1 square inch is about $1,300; 88 square inches (say, a back) is about $4,400; and there are different prices in between. The price covers however many sessions it takes.
Most tattoos require five to 10 sessions to remove. And you generally have to wait two or three months between visits. That’s because the laser is breaking up the ink into tiny particles. The body then has to absorb and excrete those particles. This takes time. The process is aided by good circulation, so usually, the closer a tattoo is to your heart—literally—the less time it takes to remove. Oddly enough, black ink is the easiest to laser off. It’s the light colors that are hardest. Still, says Sarro, with enough time—and some pain tolerance, plus an understanding that it takes the right equipment, a well-trained technician and two days of responsible aftercare—most tattoos can be removed and not even leave a scar.
With the explosion of tattooing—the Advanced Dermatology website says 39% of Americans have at least one—business at Removery and other tattoo removal parlors is booming. That’s because every tattoo tells a story, and 25% of those with ink want to change theirs.
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Ink speaks volumes
The reasons why clients run to Removery and other ink-removal shops are many, covering the gamut from bad art to life changes. And, because we’re human, there are the mistakes that need to be cleaned up.
“A patient of mine came into the office with a tattoo of a Korean phrase,” says New York City dermatologist Michele Green, MD. The patient had requested the phrase “It’s OK to go crazy!” Instead, because of a misspelled character, his ink announces to the world, “Mitch is fine too!”
New York City–based Lorenzo Kunze Jr., co-founder of Inkless, another tattoo removal chain, had a client come in with a tattoo that the client thought said “survivor.” Actually, says Kunze, it said “hot dog.”
A quick search online finds plenty more gaffes: The guy who got “RIP” for a girl he later learned was alive and well. The granddad who got a tattoo back in the ’70s that was supposed to say “Born Loser.” But—almost as if to prove the point—the tattooist spelled it “Born Looser.” Years later, his grandson wrote on Reddit that “my dad and I wanted to get a tattoo of our family crest and underneath it we got ‘Born Looser’ in Latin, to honor his stupid mistake.”
Breakups are, unsurprisingly, among the most common reasons people come to regret their body art. “I’d say the biggest culprit is names,” says Jeff Garnett, co-founder of Inkless, who has been removing tattoos for over a decade. “We do so many names that every February we run a promotion called Screw Valentine’s Day. We laser your ex’s name off for $50.”
Of course, you can forgo the cost and pain of erasing an ex’s name and try the alternative: Incorporate the old tattoo into a new design. One picture going around the internet shows a guy who got the name “SARAH” across his back in huge gothic letters. When they broke up, he added “CHA.” Now it’s “SARAHCHA,” evidently signifying his love for a certain spicy condiment.
Older and maybe wiser?
A lot of tattoo regret can be boiled down to: “I am no longer the person I was at 18.”
Folks now in ripe middle age often can’t help but notice that their once-cutting-edge designs have become about as edgy as Lipitor. In tattoos, as in any fashion statement, there are trends. In the ’90s it was tribal art, like a band of thorns around the upper arm, for men, and the “tramp stamp”—a delicate tattoo on the small of the back—for women. Then came infinity signs and “someone blowing a dandelion and the seeds turning into silhouettes of birds,” says Garnett. Those are on the way out.
“I have a client removing a teddy bear with X’s in its eyes,” says Sarro. How come? “She just didn’t want a dead bear on her leg anymore.”
Sometimes, a gag simply runs its course. Take “the mustache on the finger,” says Kunze. What? Years ago, some people thought it was hilarious to get a mustache tattooed on their finger so they could put it under their nose. Yeah, doesn’t stay funny forever.
And then there’s Derek Conlon. Derek was suspended from college for a semester for being a bit of a partier. (“We had a stripper pole in our room,” he says.) When he came back, he says, “I thought it would be funny to make my reappearance by saying ‘While I was gone, I got your name on my butt.’ ” He did this whenever he met a pretty girl at a party. “And for the first two weeks of school, I was just getting everybody with it. They were like, ‘No way!’ ” Way! He’d pull down his pants and there it was, in black ink: “Your name.”
“I’d show them, and the next thing you know, everyone’s taking out their phones. There must be, like, 500 photos on people’s phones that I went to school with of my butt cheek.” Unfortunately, he says, word spread so fast that within two weeks, when Derek would try that line at a party, “people were like, ‘You’re THAT guy!’ ” And he’d reply with embarrassed resignation, “Yeah, I’m that guy.”
While some tattoos age out, others really age out. “A thing that happens often is that, especially with body contouring, if anyone has a lot of tattoos in their groin area or their lower waist or abdomen and we do a tummy tuck, all of a sudden we cut their tattoo in half,” says Gregory A. Greco, DO, past president of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. “We remove half their skin and now it makes no sense. I’ve seen half-fish, half-dolphins, half-flowers, half-names …” And the opposite happens, too, when the body gets stretched out. The doctor saw one tattoo of a flower bouquet that grew over the years until it ended up looking, he says, “like a uterus.”
“I’m no longer that person”
Because plenty of patients want to put their tattoo life behind them, it’s not surprising to see one area of a tattoo parlor dedicated to tattoo removal. It’s not like a divorce attorney working out of a wedding hall. A clean slate just means a person is ready for something new. Sometimes even a new life.
Mauricio Arias was born in Colombia. When he was 8, his dad was murdered. Soon after that, he and his beloved older brother—his protector—moved to New York City. Life wasn’t easy. Arias hung out with gangs. He got into drugs.
“I had a lot of rage inside of me,” he says. “I wanted to kill myself. I actually tried it a couple times when I was 14. I tried to cut my veins, and I have a big scar on my arms. That’s why I got the tattoos.” Not to cover the scar. “To express how I was feeling inside.”
Soon after that, Arias found work as a tattoo artist. Over the years, he had his own face inked with tattoos of a switchblade. And brass knuckles. And a web to represent his addictions, and an “FU” because “I wanted people to look at my face and know what I was about.” Those tats did the trick. But when his brother went to prison, Arias fell even further. At his lowest point, in his early 20s, he was living in a crack house and getting high under the stairs, “doing my drugs like an animal, like a rat.” Somehow, he kept his job tattooing people, and one day one of his clients noticed the photo Arias always kept close to him.
The client said, “I know that guy.” Replied Arias, “That’s my brother.”
The realization that this man might get word to his brother about how low he’d sunk made Arias sick with shame. But the man had other plans. He invited Arias to join him at his church. Arias agreed, and that Sunday he arrived wearing a skull belt buckle, a skull necklace and, of course, his face. “I was like a dead soul,” he says. “I was waking up empty every day, crying about life.”
But in church, Arias says, God spoke to him. Told him he had a bright future—work and school and a career. Which all came to pass. Arias became a devout churchgoer. He threw his tattoo machine into the garbage, and the pastor found him odd jobs. He reunited with his wife. And at age 30 he enrolled in community college. He was moving on, but his face was not. Erasing those tattoos was expensive—a single session of tattoo removal cost $600, which he could ill afford. Then his wife searched the internet and found Garnett, who ran another tattoo removal company at the time.
Arias made what turned out to be a life-changing phone call. He says, “Jeff answered, and he was like, ‘I’ve always wanted to work with somebody like you that had a background, a story, and is trying to do better for themselves.’ ”
Garnett did the removal for free.
It’s been six years now. Arias got his associate degree and is about to get his bachelor’s degree, and he is now an assistant project manager on the $2 billion renovation of JFK Airport. Every session of tattoo removal has been hell, “like hot rubber bands hitting you on your face,” Arias says. It has also been heaven. The brass knuckles are gone. The switchblade. The FU and spiderweb. Arias’s whole face is clear of tattoos now, except for his eyelids, which pose a problem. Removing them is so tricky that it could leave him blind.
“This is how I know I’m happy,” says Arias. “Before, I wanted everything off, even my eyelid tattoos. But now,I feel accomplished. I feel good. I feel really happy, really happy, really happy. I have lived my story, and if I die looking like this, I’ll die a happy man.”
Every tattoo tells a story. Every removal does too.
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Sources:
- Michele Green, MD, dermatologist
- Lorenzo Kunze Jr., co-founder of Inkless
- Jeff Garnett, co-founder of Inkless
- Gregory A. Greco, DO, FACS, former president of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons
- Advanced Dermatology: “Study: New Statistics Surrounding Tattoo Opinions, Regrets, and Removal”
Originally Published in Reader's Digest
