GQ: Why Is Everyone Getting Their Tattoos Removed?

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Why Is Everyone Getting Their Tattoos Removed?

For decades, Americans were covering their bodies with more and more tattoos. Now, they’re getting them removed as fast as they can. We speak with the patients going under the laser, the tattoo-removal technicians whose business is booming, and the tattoo artists whose work is being erased to understand how something so permanent became so ephemeral.

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The worst part of getting a tattoo removed, apart from the searing pain and the two-year commitment, is the sound the laser makes as it hits your skin: a violent, unnatural popping and crackling that could soundtrack an animated video of someone being electrocuted. During the procedure, patients are advised to wear protective goggles to shield themselves from the laser’s rays, and they often close their eyes in fear. Without actually watching the removal process, the mind takes all the other sensory cues—mainly that awful sound—and conjures an image of some horrific mutilation occurring. It feels, and sounds, as if your body is a stretch of New York City sidewalk being torn into by a torch, electrical sparks flying every which way.

More and more people are choosing to undergo this form of torture, from reformed delinquents to millennial dads to celebrities freshening up their images.

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In the months following one of these laser sessions, a healthy person’s system will absorb some of these much smaller ink particles and flush them away, the way it would a minor virus or a small bruise. The sensitive lasered skin might sting for a few days, and then possibly get itchy, and laser technicians strongly advise their clients to stay out of the sun in the weeks after a treatment. But then, the tattoo, like the memory of the laser experience, begins to fade, slowly. A couple of months later, it’s time to repeat the process all over again. With a little bit of luck and dedication, for a healthy person most tattoos will be gone within one to two years, at which point the formerly tattooed can simply enjoy their revirginized skin—or they can start getting it tattooed again.

There is some poetic justice to the idea that reversing what was intended to be a permanent choice requires such agony and commitment. “We are literally defying the laws of gravity by getting a tattoo and having it be permanent on our skin, when our body just wants it all out,” Rebecca, a laser technician from Inkless, tells me. “We are also defying the laws when we’re removing it.”

About a third of American adults have tattoos—that’s at least 80 million people. And a quarter of those 80 million are thought to regret their body art, totaling some 20-odd-million prospective tattoo-removal clients. All of those millennials who started getting inked in their 20s, just as tattoos were evolving from something transgressive into something more commonplace? They’re now inching toward or into their 40s and feeling disconnected from their misspent youths. They’re having babies, paying mortgages, sobering up, getting colonoscopies, and eating clean. They want their bodies to reflect those dramatic existential shifts.

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