Erasing the past

I now have something in common with Cher and many ex-gang members: I am having a tattoo removed. And the process takes months, so I’ve had plenty of time to ask myself, “A tattoo? At 18 years old? What the hell was I thinking?”

It was my 18th birthday, in fact. After a couple of beers and a preventative painkiller, I got my tattoo (it was a gift). And now I’ve lived half of my life with it on my right deltoid: It’s a four-inch-long image of a salamander (chosen for its mythological symbolism, which meant — oh, something or other to me at the time), done in a realistic 3-D style and blue-black ink.

For a couple of years, I enjoyed this tattoo, and even felt it gave me a bit of counterculture cred (which I longed for). This was during the late 1980s and early 1990s, when tattoos were a bit more uncommon and more indicative of counterculture status. (Gay culture had yet to see the rise of the ubiquitous tribal-style bicep-ring tattoo.)

But by the time I was 25 or so, the salamander was no longer all that counterculture (and, thank goodness, I no longer worried so much about that sort of thing). And it wasn’t all that “me.” It was just sort of ugly — and a reminder of the fact that I had been a fairly stupid teenager who had made an all-too-common (positively trite, even) error of judgment: getting a tattoo as a fashionable accessory.

Years passed, with only an occasional regretful glance at my salamander, slithering down my shoulder past a couple of birthmarks. Then, while waiting in my dermatologist’s office one day last spring, I picked up a brochure on laser tattoo removal and read that tattoo-removal technology had gotten to a point where removal was a realistic (if rather expensive) option for me. I decided to rid myself of my youthful mistake for once and for all.

As correcting a youthful mistake often is, the process has been more difficult than I thought it would be. Getting a tattoo removed hurts quite a bit more than getting a tattoo. And it takes a lot longer: several treatments, each separated by several weeks.

My tattoo isn’t very big, so my treatments usually take about 45 minutes. First, a nurse administers 20 or so anesthetic shots to numb the area of the tattoo. This hurts a bit like — well, like getting 20 or so shots. Interestingly, none of the nurses has ever asked me anything about my tattoo during this procedure. (This surprises me a little. Tattoos are so personal; I’d be curious about the story behind the tattoo being removed.) We do make small talk, though. I always ask whether they’ve had to remove a tattoo from someone’s face. “Not yet” is the usual reply. (One talkative nurse did offer the fact that another client was removing a tattoo that she’d had for mere months.)

When my arm is numb, I meet my dermatologist in the laser room. We both don protective eyewear, and I lie down on the bed with my shoulder exposed. Then the burning begins. Even with the anesthetic, it feels as though my arm is dangerously near a pan of frying bacon and being splattered with cooking grease. The room smells of burning hair.

The laser works beneath my skin, breaking up the tattoo pigment. My body does the rest, removing the pigment in the weeks following the laser treatment. For a week after the treatment, my salamander is a bloody mess (tattoo removal is not only more painful, but also a lot gorier than getting a tattoo). To avoid scarring, I have to keep the tattoo covered by a layer of salve and a bandage for about a week after each session. This restricts my movement somewhat — no arm work at the gym. The wound feels like the kind of burn you get from a hot iron.

A week or so after the treatment, the scab over my tattoo falls away, and I’m left with a slightly lighter tattoo over a salamander-shaped red (and rather itchy) area, which I have to keep salved (again, to prevent scarring). Often, as the redness fades, I get a scaly rash over part of the treated skin.

Spring faded into summer, and now winter is almost here. After five laser treatments (and weeks of bandages and gore), the salamander is a lot lighter, but it’s still visible. I’ve got a couple more treatments to go. Right now, I have a very light salamander body on my arm: his head has faded almost completely away. (And the new skin over my right deltoid is extremely soft and supple, thanks to all the salve.)

This half-tattoo is even uglier than the tattoo was. And at $1,200 and counting, I sometimes wonder whether my impulse-purchase tattoo removal wasn’t almost as much of a mistake as getting the tattoo in the first place. The process has certainly eaten into my cosmetic-procedure budget. But it’s too late now: First I got the tattoo, and then I started the removal procedure — and as Cher knows all too well, when it comes to tattoos, you can’t turn back time.

by Charles Purdy
www.planetout.com

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