A Demographic Of Tattoos

Historically, men have been much more likely to get tattoos than have women, especially men who are members of particular groups, such as the military or motorcycle gangs. Recently, however, this trend has reversed, with about 60 percent of tattoo clientele being women (Mifflin, 1997). This particular change is difficult to explain, and it seems that it may not be so much that women are reversing the stereotype, but rather that tattooing is equalizing between the sexes. One of the enduring sex differences in tattooing is the location of the tattoo. Most women choose a location on their bodies for the tattoo that they will be able to conceal relatively easily, whereas men often choose a location they will be able to reveal relatively easily. The torso, especially the hips, buttocks, or breasts, is the most common location for women, while men usually place their first tattoos on their arms.

Tattooing is generally a peer activity with about 64 percent of tattooees coming to the shop with friends or family…. Several authors compare the decision to be tattooed with impulse shopping. Groups of friends are together, someone suggests getting tattoos, and they go to the nearest tattoo shop or one that someone may have heard of before. The vast majority of clients never research the process of tattooing nor the reputation or skill of the tattooist. Linking impulsiveness with tattooing creates a fascinating tension. By definition, tattoos are permanent. The choice of tattooist and design, therefore, should be a process rather than a capricious act. This impulsiveness can mean that the individual does not receive a well-designed tattoo, but in spite of the spontaneity of the act, the tattoo generally conveys multiple meanings for its bearer.

Both Blanchard (1994) and Sanders (1989) identify four primary overlapping functions of the tattoo. First, the tattoo functions as ritual. In a culture in which there are few rituals or rites of passage outside religion, the tattoo can serve (as it did for indigenous people who practiced tattooing) as a physical mark of a life event. These life events are interpreted as significant by the bearer, if not by society, and can vary from the winning of a sporting event or competition to the completion of a divorce to the remission of cancer (becoming a ‘cancer survivor’). The tattoo also functions as identification. By inscribing established symbols on the body, the tattooee is identifying him/herself as part of a given group. Groups can be as broad as ‘American’ to the very specific, such as a family or partner’s name.

A third function of tattooing is protective. The tattoo can be a symbol or talisman to protect its bearer from general or specific harm. Sanders (1989) relates an interview with a man who had a tattoo of a fierce and angry bee inscribed on his arm. The man told Sanders that he was allergic to bees and had been stung so much that his physician feared the next sting might prove fatal. Having decided he needed protection against bees, the man decided to get a bee tattoo/talisman to frighten the bees from stinging him again. Finally, the fourth function of tattoos is decorative. Regardless of their particular psychosocial function for the individual, tattoos are images (even words become images as/within tattoos). By modifying the body with tattoos, the individual has chosen to add permanent decoration to his/her body.

Having this decorative function, tattoos are often associated with exhibitionism. Although there is indeed an element of desire to reveal tattoos, there is often an equally profound desire to conceal tattoos. Revealing the tattoo has several functions, including showing the individual’s stylishness, identifying a group to which they belong, and demonstrating their rebelliousness. The desire to conceal can stem from the deeply personal meaning of the tattoo for the individual or from the deeply embedded social stigma. While the tattooed person enjoys the positive attention from his/her peers generated by the tattoo, most of these same people feel embarrassed about the negative reactions they get from others, especially when this reaction is coming from friends and family. People with tattoos try to avoid and resent questions such as ‘Why would you do that to yourself?’ or ‘Do you know what kind of people get tattoos?’

Even as tattooing becomes more prevalent in the USA, there is still a persistent taboo on tattoos. People with tattoos often feel that they should cover their body markings in public or risk social rejection. Tattooing remains a marginalized occupation, in spite of its record for professionalism and safety. Why is it that the tattoo can be so enshrouded by a myth of deviance, and elicit such disgust? What are the meanings that American culture has constructed for the social practice of tattooing? And how does this practice negotiate the social and cultural space in the USA to build personal meaning for the individual marked by tattooing?

Ideology Body Modification - Tattoo

This presentation will look at how this phenomenon has been addressed by individuals within the modded (i.e., modified) community. The explanations and justifications cited by members of this community to define, explain, defend, or laud their practices can be considered ideologies. An ideology is a worldview, a component of an individual or a group identity, a way of defining in-group and out-group, and a way of dealing with crises that confront matters of identity. Yet, an ideology also has the following components: it is articulated, conflictual, subjective, and public. In what follows, my intention is to explore how people with post-modified bodies1 strategically use their modifications in discourse; and to investigate how modification ideologies function. My intention is not to define a single and coherent ideology that can be applied to every modified person in the world, rather I will explore how some individuals within the on and off line community of www.bmezine.com (or the Body Modification ezine) use their modded identification in times of crisis. I say on and off line because although much of this community is virtual there is a good amount of these people that hang out together offline.

Much of this is evidenced on BME members’ IAM or personal membership pages and also in the proliferation of many local BME inspired events that range from ritual flesh-hook suspensions to bbqs and parties. It is also worth noting that the subjects of this presentation are either from the U.S. or Canada. I chose the examples used in this paper because they use themes that are common in the BME community and because I think they offer up interesting points of entry in considering the larger body-art modification community. For a thorough discussion of the post-modified body see Matthew C. Lodder’s web page to download a copy of his master’s thesis “The Post-Modified Body: Invasive Corporeal Transformation and its Effects on Subjective Identity: http://iam.bmezine.com/?volatile. In addition to the coining of the helpful phrase “post- modified body,” Lodder diligently and insightfully explores modification on its own terms as a personal choice, rather than as an indication of social malaise or personal pathology. This allows for an interesting analysis of the self, identity, and the body.


Ideology has several definitions and uses. This presentation relies heavily on sociologist Ann Swidler’s definition of ideology in her book Talk of Love: How Culture Matters, which explores how people use different cultural scripts or metaphors for their love relationships and how such usage alters in times of crisis. Swidler views ideology as a specific modality of culture in relation to empowerment (95). So before defining ideology, it will be necessary to briefly describe what she means by culture. Culture, for Swidler, is made up of the following: “[t]rained capacities to think and feel”; it helps to “internalize skills, styles, and habits”; it is used “to delineate group boundaries”; and “offers ideas and images that constitute a view of the world” (73-75). Most importantly is how culture works. The model she proposes is the “‘identity’ model. The fundamental notion is that people develop lines of action2 based on who they already 2 A line or strategy of action is best understood by reference to Swidler’s notion of culture as a repertoire or toolbox. In other words, it’s the culture one has internalized and uses in approaching everyday situations think they are” (87). This is of utmost importance in a discussion of body modification as an ideology. Especially, if we consider what has been said of postmodern identity as plastic and reflexive, no longer is identity ascribed, it is achieved or chosen. This makes for a more self-conscious sense of identity. The collective culture of body modification is loose and difficult to pin down, at times. Rather than offering up some systematic worldview, the general subculture revolves around identification. Since a self-identified and coherent culture of an explicitly named and self-referential “modified culture” is emerging (somewhere between parallel and collective behavior, see Bainbridge, p. 368-369), but not necessarily formalized and organized politically—in comparison to black, queer, or feminist culture, for example—the most obvious cultural marker is the modified body. Although, it can be argued that sub-groups within the larger modified body phenomena are clearly defined and self-aware: e.g., modern primitives. This lack of formalization—or status as an organized social movement—makes their subcultural identity of central importance, especially when that identity is put into question, or is used explicitly to pathologize one’s cultural or personal experience. Broadly speaking, Swidler likens ideology to a worldview. More specifically, she uses it in contrast to the terms of common sense and tradition. “An ideology is an articulated, self-conscious belief and ritual system, aspiring to offer a unified answer to problems of social action” (96). However, we must not be misled by the term system. It should not be understood so much as a logically consistent model—even Swidler admits Such as internalizing the concept of time, without such a cultural notion, how would one be able to navigate the corporate, 9-5 culture?; Lines of action are “ways actors routinely go about attaining their goals. … Culture affects action by shaping that repertoire of routine, natural styles, skills, and habits that together organize and sustain a strategy [i.e., line] of action” (82).

Instead, we might consider it to be a set or collection of cultural signs that become a “unified answer” when engaged. Ideologies (especially, subcultural ones) are less coherent in themselves than made coherent as a result of being engaged around specific identity issues or power struggles. In her essay “Culture in Action” Swidler notes of ideologies that “rather than providing the underlying assumptions of an entire way of life, they make explicit demands in a contested cultural arena” (279). Underlying assumptions are left primarily to common sense and tradition. Common sense is “unselfconscious as to seem a natural … part … of the world;” and tradition presents itself as “fixed” and an “expected [part] of life” that “establish[es] expected forms of conduct, even when people consciously feel quite disaffected from those traditions” (96). For Swidler, then, ideology is not only an articulated system of signs, but also a self-awareness that coheres around a specific social problem. Her definition also implies an oppositional nature because it is contrasted with common sense, which Swidler derives from hegemony or the “dominant conception of the world” (94-95). However, she does little to infuse an explicit notion of conflict within her definition of ideology. Conflict will be important to our discussion, however, because it fosters a sense of crisis, which is needed to in order to help create the social space necessary to engage ideology. In An Introduction to Ideology, Marxist and critical theorist Terry Eagleton examines the origins of the term ideology and how it has been used in various ways since its springing forth from the head of Enlightenment thinker and French revolutionary Antoine Destutt de Tracy while imprisoned during the Reign of Terror. Eagleton addresses such a lack of conflict in the sociological use of ideology. Although, he agrees with the sociological point of view that ideology “provides the ‘cement’ of a social formation … which orients its agents to action” he emphasizes that such a usage “too often [has a] depoliticizing … effect, voiding the concept of ideology of conflict and contradiction” (222). Eagleton’s insight and analysis of the many faces of ideology will be helpful here. In addition to emphasizing conflict, Eagleton notes other necessary characteristics of ideology: it is subject and action oriented, universalizing, and naturalizing. Subjective is not to be considered synonymous with private. Ideology is subjective in that it is “subject-centered” or identity-based. The utterances “are to be deciphered as expressive of a speaker’s attitudes or lived relations to the world” or the dominant culture (Eagleton, 19). This could be considered an engaged subjectivity.

This quality of engagement points to the universalizing or “making public” quality of ideology. Universalizing, Eagleton explains, is the processes of making “values and interests which are … specific to a certain place and time” and projecting these onto “the values and interests of all humanity” (Eagleton, 56). I would like to nuance this term a bit, especially the “all humanity” part. First and foremost it is the tendency to engage the public. The immediate public, at times, may also be the lived world or universe, so that it could be considered “all humanity” as far as the subject is concerned. Secondly, the scope of the engagement will necessarily expand past the specific place, time, and individual because it is engaging the values and interests of the dominant society. A consequence of engaging the lived world is the tendency for proponents of an ideology to naturalize their interests. Naturalizing is an attempt “to identify [beliefs and interests] with the ‘common sense’ of a society so that nobody could imagine how they might ever be different” (Eagleton, 58). For purposes of this presentation, naturalizing has less to do with completely supplanting existing notions of what is considered natural or God given, than a re-alignment or re-framing of pre-existing notions of what is natural. The most important consequence of all these characteristics is that they are necessarily action-oriented. In Eagleton’s words ideological discourses “must be translatable … into a ‘practical’ state, capable of furnishing their adherents with goals, motivations, prescriptions, imperatives, and so on” (47). This action oriented-ness is also implied in Swidler’s reference to culture as influencing a person’s line of action by providing certain cultural tools, which incidentally shape what kind or type of action is possible. Finally, it is important to return to one of the points Swidler has made about ideology: that it is “articulated” or uttered. Swidler studies how people talk or articulate their positions on love and marriage. Beyond this talk, though, she also has a lengthy section on semiotic codes.3 Her description mostly revolves around behavior. Her study, taken as a whole, then, would tend to look at articulation as something both verbal and non-verbal (i.e., bodily or behavioral)4. Eagleton describes the discourse aspect of ideology as follows: Ideology is a matter of ‘discourse’ rather than of [mere] ‘language’ … It represents the points where power impacts upon certain utterances and inscribes itself tacitly within them. … the concept of ideology aims to disclose something of the relation between an utterance and its material conditions of possibility, when those conditions of possibility are viewed in the light of certain power-struggles central to the reproduction … of a whole form of social life” (223).

3 “A semiotic code is a self-referential system of meanings in which each element in the system takes its meaning not from its inherent properties or from some external referent, but from the meanings created by the code itself” (Swidler, 162). [e.g. normative gender: people are assigned gender based on genitalia and expected to act as either male or female and all action is understood within this framework , as well.]

4 In the book Semiotics for Beginners published both online and in print Daniel Chandler, lecturer in Dept. of Theatre, Film, and Television Studies at University of Wales, Aberystwyth, breaks semiotic social codes into the following categories: verbal, bodily, commodity, and behavioral.

Eagleton’s description of the discourse or articulation of ideology gets to the center of the conflictual aspect of ideology: power-struggle. This points to the understanding that discourses and semiotic codes are social constructs that constrain and facilitate power by defining proper and improper action. Considering these characteristics: ideology (especially an emergent subcultural one) is an identity-based and centered, self consciously chosen use of culture that articulates an active and conflictual engagement of the dominant culture. Although, this definition is useful, it is seemingly static. In other words, it seems that ideology is somehow always “on” or always on the tip of a subject’s tongue. It is necessary, then, to return to Swidler in order to nuance the function of ideology and view it as something that is turned “on” or engaged at certain times while turned “off” or not engaged at others. Swidler talks of settled and unsettled lives (personal) and periods (social). Her point is that “we cannot look to the characteristics of the ideology alone for a full understanding of its causal significance” (103). Rather, she wants to draw our attention to the greater social context. She posits that ideologies tend to be engaged in times of crisis. I want to extend her argument to include that the reality of unsettled times and crises is grounded primarily in the perception of individuals or groups, rather than primarily in material reality (Smith, 1998; for subcultural perception of outside threat p. 152; for perceptions and beliefs being “real in their consequences” p. 173). For material reality always needs to be perceived or interpreted in order to be understood. Perception is the lived experience of material reality and cannot be thought of in terms of being unreal and thus degraded as false (Eagleton, 22). So, it is exactly with this understanding of unsettled times or unsettling experiences both perceived and material that ideologies as defined above become engaged. That ideologies are self-conscious and articulated points to the interdependence between one’s identity and ideology. It is exactly over issues of identity and the body that body modification is engaged as an ideology in the larger Western context.

Identity is a common theme in the articles on BMEzine. There are many reader editorials that discuss crises that develop when their modifications confront social norms or vice versa. In one posting, a soon-to-be-modded high school student is annoyed and perplexed by his school’s policy, which mandates that bandages be worn over all facial piercings if students wish to avoid expulsion: [E]verybody has the right to do what they wish to their body. A nose ring should not affect anybody’s rights to anything. A tattoo should not have an affect [sic] on your future. By suspending and expelling our children from school due to their modifications, we are telling them that … they must change their appearance and look more “normal” to satisfy others, and not themselves. We, the students, do have ONE weapon,. This is a new act passed by Congress regarding freedom of expression in the form of things such as clothing, piercings, etc. The second is the good old First Amendment [or freedom of speech]. There are many things that make this excerpt interesting. One is that the student is identifying with the modded community even though he is not yet modded. This quality, if isolated, speaks to the power of identity within the body modification community. Within the framework set forth in this paper, it is evident that this student responded ideologically toward this attack on modified students. The student clearly articulates, an oppositional, subjective-engagement of dominant culture and attempts to naturalize body modification with rights language. For example, he states that “[E]verybody has the right to do what they wish to their body,” as well as a direct reference to the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights.
Suddenly, this issue is not just about an individual or a group of students at a specific school, but about the rights of an entire populace organized or cohering around the issue of body modification. As an emergent ideology, body modification must still rely on the language of common sense and other traditions. The student borrows heavily from rights language and from the common-sense adage that people should be themselves. (Consider Carl Elliott’s references to scripts of authenticity yesterday.) This student’s articulation of a body modification ideology came about because the subject’s lived world (i.e., school) became hostile to his desire to become modified. This example represents how ideologies are engaged in unsettled times.

Cheryl Cole completes tattoo collection with huge design

British pop star Cheryl Cole is finished with tattoos after having a huge rose design inked onto her back over a painful two-day period. The Fight For This Love hitmaker stunned fans on the opening night of the Girls Aloud comeback tour in Newcastle, England on Thursday night (21Feb13) when she showed off the massive inking on the small of her back. The design, two red roses in bloom, was completed after 15 hours in the tattooist's chair over an agonising two days last year (12), and Cole admits her latest body art will probably be her last. She tells Britain's The Sun, "It was really painful but I think I'm done with tattoos now. It wasn't for any particular reason, I just liked the design. It took 15 hours in total. "I actually got it five months ago - but it's somewhere on my body you wouldn't expect people to see it very often. It was done by this amazing artist called Nikko Hurtado who basically travels round the world going to conventions." The star boasts a number of tattoos, including a Polynesian tribal symbol on her hand and barbed wire around her thigh.

Adding and Subtracting Tattoo

A few days ago I was out to dinner with old BME friends, and one conversation that came up was some of BME’s old April Fools articles. I think my favorite was “Love At First Bite” because it was so believable and fooled a good percentage of even the most experienced readers… But the article that started BME’s pranks was one first published April 1, 1999 — “Adding and Subtracting” — and one of the reasons it was so successful was that it was not just BME’s first joke article, but was published in an era before April 1st being a day where the entire web was flooded with nothing but jokes, making the whole thing less convincing. Anyway, since I couldn’t find this article in BME’s public articles, I’ve decided to republish here for historical reasons! After the article you can also read some of the responses the article generated, including a multitude of requests for interviews includingDetails, ICON, and The Village Voice.

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Ryan and Dave are the most unique identical twins you’ll ever meet. After tiring of piercing, tattoos, and implants about three years ago, they began exploring much heavier surgical modifications. Dave had spent two and a half years in pre-med at Queens University in Kingston, and using contacts made both there and online he and his twin brother have changed themselves in ways far beyond anything anyone else has ever attempted

RYAN: I guess when we were about thirteen we started getting tattooed. This is when we were living in Phoenix. I won’t deny that we had pretty poor judgement and got some pretty bad tattoos. Luckily, they were fairly light and over time we got some real nice coverups, as you can see.

DAVE: Our lives in Phoenix were actually pretty rough and our parents knew that we were running with the wrong crowd, so when we were sixteen they sent us to live with our aunt in Toronto Canada it was a bit of a culture shock but turned out for the best. I finished high school at the top of my class and was offered a biology scholarship at Queens University which soon transitioned into Pre-Med. Ryan stayed in Toronto and got hooked up with the piercing scene.

RYAN: Some friends of mine were just setting up a new studio Dave and I had been doing piercings on our friends for about a year, and it just seemed like the right thing at the right time so I decided to become a piercer. At this point the piercing community was pretty young and it was an “anything goes” scene and still mostly underground I got to meet a lot of guys into amputation and castration and really heavy stuff. It got me thinking a lot about what we wanted to do with our own bodies. I introduced Dave to them as well and he shared my feelings.

BME: What happened next?

Ryan “holding on to” Dave’s arm.

RYAN: After discussing and thinking about it very seriously for about a year, we decided to take the big step. To put it simply, Dave had his entire right arm (since we’re left handed) amputated at the shoulder and we surgically reattached it immediately behind my right pectoral muscle.

BME: Wow. If I wasn’t looking at it right now I’d never believe it. How was the procedure done?

DAVE: Obviously there was no clinic willing to do a procedure like this (we didn’t even bother to ask), so we had to do it all under local anaesthesia since we simply didn’t have the facilities to safely administer general anaesthesia. We had a group of two practitioners and two assistants working on us. First we elevated my arm and using an Ace bandage we slowly squeezed all of the blood out of it. Then we tourniquetted as high up on the shoulder it could be, and injected lidocaine into the exsanguinated veins. Almost immediately there was no feeling whatsoever. An amputation knife cut through the skin and muscles, and a bone saw did the final removal. Bleeders were ligated and the wound was cleaned up. This entire part of the procedure took about forty minutes.

RYAN: At the same time as Dave was being worked on, the other practitioner and his assistant prepared the attachment site on my chest. Veins and arteries were spliced to supply blood to Dave’s arm and the skin and some of the subcutaneous tissue was peeled up to merge as smoothly as possible. Luckily the healing went smoothly. The transplant healed up in about a month, as did Dave’s stump.

BME: You’re a bit vague as to who did it. Who were the “practitioners” and how did you find them?

DAVE: When we had the procedure done we signed non-disclosure agreements and legally swore to protect the identities of everyone involved. As far as how we met them, you’d be amazed how many kooks you meet in med school. That’s as far as I’m willing to go on that question; I’m sure your readers will understand. This type of procedure is simply not acceptable.

BME: Did you have any difficulties with rejection?

RYAN: That’s the nice thing about being identical twins! We share the same genetics!

BME: You can’t be that identical You’re wearing glasses and Dave isn’t.

RYAN: Dave wears contacts; he’s vain. Anyway, because our genetics are the same, healing a transplant is no more difficult that healing a severe laceration. I’m exaggerating a little, but it’s not the same as a regular transplant.

Left: Dave, Right: Ryan

BME: The arm is amazing, but I’ve got to admit that this “alien finger” thing you’ve done is really something. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. It’s actually quite disconcerting!

RYAN: Yeah, we’re very proud of it. When people see the arm, they think it was an accident — transplants like this do get done every once in a while for medical reasons. The finger though, that’s art. We challenge anyone to take body art to a higher level.

BME: How did you pull this one off?

DAVE: First we removed the centre joint of my finger, along with the skin and just over an inch of overhanging tendon. Then we split Ryan’s finger at the end of the first joint. It was relatively easy to insert the extra joint, especially since we had so much extra tendon to play with. The amazing thing is that Ryan actually has feeling in the end of that finger now — the nerves were compatible!

BME: Dave, why are you wearing a bandaid over your stubby finger?

DAVE: When we put my finger tip back on, minus the middle joint, we didn’t have enough tendon to work with so I don’t actually have very much mobility in it. I tend to bang it a lot. We’re actually going to remove it altogether and remove the bone right down to the wrist. That will let us shift the little finger over without much apparent scarring giving us a very realistic three fingered hand.

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BME: Can I ask what the two of you do for a living? I assume you don’t have regular jobs.

DAVE: We make a great living in the traditional world. I’m not going to say the name of our company, but to suffice it to say that we’re the sixth largest producer of adult entertainment software in North America. The Ferrari Dino 246 that Ryan is leaning on right now is a $50,000 car. That may not seem like a lot of money, but we paid it off in one day. Not all “freaks” are punk kids.

BME: I know you don’t really like talking about this that much, but… why?

RYAN: First and foremost, we consider ourselves artists. A lot of our friends and associates who have similar interests have a more fetish oriented body modification attitude about it — while we respect that point of view, it’s not what we’re about.

BME: Any regrets?

DAVE: I guess I’m the one that should answer that one. No. Not at all. We share everything. I don’t feel that I’ve given anything up. I’m not sure if anyone who’s not an identical twin can really understand the strange bond that’s going on here. I’ve never had a phantom limb pain. It really feels like it’s all still a part of me.

BME: What modifications does the future hold for you two?

DAVE: We’ve got some genital work planned that’s pretty exciting. As soon as it happens we’ll be sure to update BME readers with some photos.

Inked and Regretful: Removing Tattoos

That tattoo on your arm of a former flame the one that seemed like a great idea years ago is kind of embarrassing today. And your spouse is not too crazy about it either.

You may not know that FDA considers the inks used in tattoos to be cosmetics, and the agency takes action to protect consumers when safety issues arise related to the inks.

At the other end of the tattoo process, FDA also regulates laser devices used to remove tattoos.

FDA has cleared for marketing several types of lasers as light-based, prescription devices for tattoo lightening or removal. A Massachusetts company recently received FDA clearance to market its laser workstation for the removal of tattoos and benign skin lesions.

According to a poll conducted in January 2012 by pollster Harris Interactive, 1 in 8 (14%) of the 21% of American adults who have tattoos regret getting one. And the American Society for Dermatologic Surgery (ASDS) reports that in 2011, its doctors performed nearly 100,000 tattoo removal procedures, up from the 86,000 performed in 2010.

Unfortunately, removing a tattoo is not as simple as changing your mind.

Artists create tattoos by using an electrically powered machine that moves a needle up and down to inject ink into the skin, penetrating the epidermis, or outer layer, and depositing a drop of ink into the dermis, the second layer. The cells of the dermis are more stable compared with those of the epidermis, so the ink will mostly stay in place for a person’s lifetime. Tattoos are meant to be permanent.

An effective and safe way to remove tattoos is through laser surgery, performed by a dermatologist who specializes in tattoo removal, says FDA's Mehmet Kosoglu, Ph.D., who reviews applications for marketing clearances of laser-devices.

Lasers Used for Decades

"Laser" stands for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. Kosoglu says that pulsed lasers, which emit concentrated light energy in short bursts, or pulses, have been used to remove tattoos for more than 20 years.

However, it can be a painstaking process. "Complete removal, with no scarring, is sometimes not possible," Kosoglu notes.

FDA clearance means this method for removing tattoos complies with agency requirements for safety and effectiveness, according to FDA dermatologist Markham Luke, M.D. Other methods include dermabrasion actually "sanding" away the top layer of skin and excision cutting away the area of the tattoo and then sewing the skin back together.

There are also do-it-yourself tattoo removal ointments and creams that you can buy online. "FDA has not approved them, and is not aware of any clinical evidence that they work," says Luke. In addition, Luke says that tattoo removal ointments and creams may cause unexpected reactions, such as rashes, burning, scarring, or changes in skin pigmentation in the process.

How Does It Work?

With laser removal, pulses of high-intensity laser energy pass through the epidermis and are selectively absorbed by the tattoo pigment. The laser breaks the pigment into smaller particles, which may be metabolized or excreted by the body, or transported to and stored in lymph nodes or other tissues, Kosoglu explains.

The type of laser used to remove a tattoo depends on the tattoo's pigment colors, he adds. Because every color of ink absorbs different wavelengths of light, multi-colored tattoos may require the use of multiple lasers. Lighter colors such as green, red, and yellow are the hardest colors to remove, while blue and black are the easiest.

Does It Hurt?

"That depends on a person’s pain threshold," Kosoglu says. Some people compare the sensation of laser removal to being spattered with drops of hot bacon grease or snapping a thin rubber band against the skin. A trained dermatologist will be able to adjust the treatment to the patient’s comfort level.

Generally speaking, just one laser treatment won't do the trick. According to the American Academy of Dermatology, the procedure requires multiple treatments (typically six to 10) depending on a tattoo's size and colors, and requires a few weeks of healing time between procedures. Some side effects may include pinpoint bleeding, redness, or soreness, none of which should last for long.

Luke says that these laser devices are cleared for use by, or under the supervision of, a health care professional. The removal procedure requires using the correct type of laser, understanding the reaction of tissue to laser, and knowing how to treat the area after the procedure.

"If you have any concerns about having a tattoo removed, it's a good idea to consult your dermatologist, who is knowledgeable about laser treatments," Luke concludes.

The ASDS has a list of dermatological surgeons who specialize in tattoo removal.

Consumers are asked to report adverse (negative) reactions from tattoos, as well as problems with tattoo removal, to FDA’s MedWatch