Tattoo removal makes it possible to erase the past

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Tattoo removal makes it possible to erase the past
July 5, 2011
Patricia Anstett
The Tennessean

The popularity of tattoos — favored by some celebrities and athletes on seemingly every inch of their bodies — has created a counter-trend of removal services for a growing number of the regretful.

Though “tattoo” still ranks in the top 10 Web searches — as it has for a decade — technology has improved over the years that can now remove difficult greens and blues, providing first-ever opportunities for people who want to erase old memories, amateurish work, even misspelled words.

The removals can take as many as 15 painful treatments, four to six weeks apart, and sometimes costing 10 times the price of the original tattoo. In some cases, removal can discolor the skin and leave scars and blotches.

People with romantic regrets, such as actor Johnny Depp, go in for cover-ups and changes. The name “Winona Ryder,” once tattooed on Depp’s upper right arm, now says “Wino Forever.”
Reasons to say good-bye

Unwanted memories are driving tattoo removal to new heights as thousands pour into doctor’s offices and tattoo parlors to erase or cover up old designs.

Career and lifestyle changes and stints in the military, which prohibits many larger, visible tattoos, also are driving the trend.

“I just grew out of it,” said Sarah Parasiliti, 30, of Ortonville, Mich., who is undergoing the tattoo removal process on her lower right arm for a design of a bird over the word “Sorelle,” sisters in Italian.

She and her two older sisters got the same tattoos in 2004. Now married with three young children, Parasiliti wants it off before she begins nursing school this fall. She doesn’t want to be judged negatively, she said. But her sisters, keeping their tattoos, have given her some flack.

She needs at least eight treatments, at $139 per square inch.

Dr. David Schwartzenfeld, one of two physician-owners of Erase the Ink M.D., a tattoo removal business, assured her he could remove 100 percent of the tattoo.

The Michigan practice sees about 50-60 patients a week. Its website, www.erasetheinkmd.com, posts a “Bad Tattoo of the Week.” One photo shows a woman with two large, colorful pistols pointing downward from her stomach toward her bikini line. A black tattoo stretches across another patient’s shoulders with the misspelled message of extreme ego: “I’m Awsome.”

The center and others also are seeing a budding business in tattoo fading, using lasers to obliterate old work “to create a new canvas for an artist,” Schwartzenfeld said.

Tattoo parlors also are getting in on the touch-up business. “We try to be creative and cover the old tattoo” with something better, said Duane Fager, a 30-year tattoo artist.
Have you got time for pain?

A new generation of lasers is making removal easier and more effective. But it is still costly, time-consuming and painful.

“It’s the most painful procedure we do,” said Dr. Eric Seiger, a medical doctor with the Skin & Vein Center in Sterling Heights, Fenton and Garden City, Mich.

Doctors pay as much as $225,000 for the latest tattoo removal equipment, including state-of-the-art, Q-switched YAG lasers that can now successfully treat a broader range of tattoo pigments.

Still, “it's very difficult to predict which tattoos” will respond to laser treatment, said Dr. Michael Margolis, co-owner of Erase the Ink.

Some tattoos, particularly large ones on darker skin done professionally with more than black ink may be tough, even impossible to remove, he and other doctors say.

The darker the skin, the greater the risk of discoloration from laser tattoo removal, and it can take several months, possibly years, before the area fades closer to a person’s true skin tone.

Small, amateur drawings in black ink on fair skin are easier.

Kristie Bell, 39, of Stockbridge said she decided to have a rose tattoo on her chest removed because “it was much bigger than I wanted.”

The rose, the size of a half-dollar, is almost gone after eight laser treatments at the University of Michigan’s Cosmetic Dermatology and Laser Center.

“I’m not ashamed of it,” she said. “It’s just a personal decision.”