This ink stinks

Tattoo removal increases in popularity

By Kathleen Megan=
(c) 2002, The Hartford Courant

Anna Chastain was raised in a family where tattooing and piercings were forbidden, so she knew exactly how to rebel.
She went out and got a Playboy bunny on her breast, a flower on her thumb and the words “Harley Angel” on her shoulder. She was 15.
“I did it because it was cool,” Chastain says now, 10 years later. “It was immaturity and stupidity.”
She is now studying to be a nurse, with ambitions to become a doctor, and her desire to be able to go sleeveless--whether in tank top or cocktail dress --has brought her to the office of Dr. James D. Whalen, director of dermatologic surgery at the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington.
Stretched out in a reclining chair last week, next to a state-of-the-art laser, Chastain tells Whalen to turn up the laser strength as much as possible. “Let's get this over with,” she says.
These tattoos, she explains, are not “something I want to take into the rest of my life.”
With the huge growth in the number of people getting tattoos, it's likely that Whalen and other doctors who remove tattoos with lasers will see a swell in business in the next 10 years.
While years ago only sailors, Marines and bikers typically had tattoos, it has become a middle-American fad in recent years.
A nationwide survey of 1,001 people, released last month by the University of Connecticut Center for Survey Research and Analysis, showed that among young adults ages 18 to 29, 35 percent of women and 30 percent of men had tattoos.
That's way up from the late '80s, when about 10 percent of people had tattoos, according to Clinton Sanders, a UConn sociology professor and author of a book about artistic tattooing called “Customizing the Body.”
UConn graduate student Diana Tracy Cohen, the designer of the recent survey, said that, with a tattoo parlor near campus, tattoos are very common among students. She herself has the Chinese symbol for bravery emblazoned on her shoulder.
“In all honesty, my mom cried,” said Cohen. “She said, ‘Why did you do that? What if you decide you want to take it off when you're older?’”
It's a question that Chastain advises those who are getting tattoos today to think about as the doctor prepares to give her what will be the eighth treatment on her thumb and shoulder. The Playboy bunny disappeared after five treatments, with only the slightest bit of mottling noticeable.
“Every time I hear someone say they want to get a tattoo, I tell them exactly what I went through and what I'm going through now,” said Chastain, who has been receiving treatments for a year.
Although the laser removal of tattoos is far preferable to the old methods--including dermabrasion, where skin is `sanded' to remove the tattoo, and excision, where it is cut out--it is far from painless or perfect, and it is expensive.
“Most people come in, and they think--lasers ... high tech, ‘Star Wars.’ They expect (the tattoo) will be magically gone,” said Demian Fontanella, Whalen's medical assistant.
But it can be a long and somewhat arduous process, spread out over seven or eight months and sometimes longer.
In most cases, patients have a satisfactory result, though complete removal without any visible scarring or mottling only occurs in about 10 percent to 15 percent of the cases, Fontanella said.
Chastain remembers paying about $50 for the Harley Angel tattoo, but she has paid about $250 to $300 for each treatment to have it removed. The removal of all three tattoos will probably cost about $3,000, which generally is not covered by insurance.
Lasers were developed for industrial use in the 1960s, but it was the invention of the Q-switched laser--a huge machine with a movable arm like a dentist's drill--that enabled doctors to