Question:
Tattoo Removal Business?
Per the article below, tattoo removal is a growth industry. If you
join it, I would suggest as a business name "Tattoodle-oo".
Answer:
- The laser shoots a beam of light that looks like fire and makes a
sizzling noise -- Bzzzzzt! -- as it moves across Melissa Morrissette's
tattoo. Morrissette winces. She closes her eyes, which are covered by
orange goggles, and takes long, slow breaths, fighting the pain. It
hurts to get a tattoo removed.
"It's 10 times more painful than getting it put on," she says.
The tattoo is on her left arm -- three ankhs connected in a circle
around her biceps. An ankh is a cross topped with a loop, an ancient
Egyptian symbol of eternal life. Morrissette, 37, has worn it for seven
years. But now she's a real-estate agent working for an Annapolis
company that doesn't permit visible tattoos. For a year, she covered it
with long sleeves, but this summer she decided to get it removed.
That's why she's here in the Laser Center of Maryland in Severna Park,
paying $1,700 for six laser treatments that sting and burn.
Waiting to get zapped, her skin numbed by a cream, she remembers the
day she got the tattoo, when the guy wielding the needle had a burst of
artistic inspiration and decided to add flourishes.
"I could feel him doing something different and I looked and saw these
red lines coming out of the ankh," she recalls. "I said, 'What's that?'
And he said, 'It's a mystic mist.' I said, 'What does that mean?' To
me, it looked like varicose veins."
She had to hire another tattoo artist to cover up those red lines with
a reddish-orange cloud.
Now, seven years later, the whole glorious artwork is being blasted
away.
"The interesting thing about tattoo removal," says Ross Van Antwerp,
the doctor who founded the Laser Center of Maryland, "is that there's
always a story behind every tattoo."
Over 16 years, Van Antwerp, 52, has erased thousands of tattoos and
heard thousands of tattoo stories -- bizarre stories, hilarious
stories, stories that support the recent revelation that human beings
are 98 percent genetically identical to the chimpanzee.
"Years ago, I had one homemade tattoo that covered the whole cheek of a
woman's buttock and it said, in very crude lettering, Property of Nicky
," Van Antwerp says. "This woman was not married to Nicky and, to add
insult to injury, the word 'property' was misspelled."
He smiles. "It's a fairly simple word," he says, "but apparently Nicky
was a fairly simple guy."
He bursts out laughing.
"I like to talk to my patients," he says. "When they're having a name
removed, I ask them, Is this person no longer around? I had a guy some
years ago who had the name Colleen on his arm. He said, 'That's my
first wife's name, but I've been through three Colleens.' I said,
'Really? Is that a requirement of yours? Do they all have to be named
Colleen?' He said, 'No, not at all. Colleen is not that common a name
and I think I'm attracting them because I have their name on my arm.
And the Colleen thing has never worked for me. That's why I'm here. I
have to get this thing off. I have to try something else.' "
Van Antwerp laughs again. He's sitting in his office between patients,
wearing dark-blue scrubs. He has removed homemade tattoos, professional
tattoos, tribal tattoos, gang tattoos, even jailhouse tattoos made with
a safety pin and cigarette ash. He has erased tattoos from every part
of the human body surface, even parts you'd think are far too tender to
be exposed to a tattoo needle. The phrase "love pump" was tattooed on
one guy's . . . well, never mind.
Van Antwerp once erased a naked woman from the arm of a minister of
God. "He was a guy who grew up on the streets of Baltimore and went
through rough times," he says, "and then he had a religious
transformation and became a pastor."
One day, a young woman came in with a Chinese character tattooed on her
neck. "She was told it meant 'desert flower,' " Van Antwerp says. "And
she was getting a lot of attention from Chinese men. And finally
somebody told her that it was a very crude Chinese word for prostitute.
Some Chinese tattoo artist was making a joke."
So many tattoos, so many stories. But they all have one thing in
common: Somebody made a mistake and now wants to erase it. Like divorce
lawyers, revival preachers and parole officers, tattoo removers are in
the business of helping people shed the past and start anew.
The second chance -- it's a great American tradition. But sometimes it
doesn't work out as planned.
"I had a guy who had a tattoo on his arm and he wanted it off and he'd
gone through five treatments," Van Antwerp says. "It was a big tattoo
and it was costing him a significant amount of money. Then he went to a
business meeting in D.C. and he got out a little early and he hit a
happy hour and he's walking down the street and he goes into a tattoo
parlor and he walks out with a big black-and-red yin-yang thing in the
same spot on his arm.
"He came in the next day, distraught," Van Antwerp continues. "He said,
'It's the worst mistake I ever made.' "
"I said, 'Look, you're a married guy, you've got kids, you have a
business. I'm sure there are worse mistakes you could have made. At
least this one we can fix.' "
Van Antwerp pauses. His lips curl into an impish grin. "But still,
every time I saw him, I'd say, ' I can't wait to see what's coming here
next!' ''
And he bursts out laughing again.
The Colors of Money
Tattoo removal is a great growth industry! A fabulous business
opportunity!
Look around, my friends. Look at those fresh-faced young people with
their backward ball caps and their droopy jeans. Notice the tattoos
adorning their slender, tender flesh -- the string of barbed wire
around that buff guy's biceps, the little heart on that pretty gal's
belly with her boyfriend's name -- Dwayne -- inscribed inside it.
Lovely, isn't it?
But some day, my friends, these young people will grow older and fatter
and their bodies will sag and they'll look in the mirror and think,
Boy, that tattoo looks dumb, and besides, I haven't seen Dwayne since I
caught him in bed with . . .
When that day comes, my friends, you will wish you were in the tattoo
removal business.
Consider the history: Fifty years ago, tattoos were signs of adventure
-- exotic markings found on the arms of sailors and bikers and guys who
got them on Cellblock D in exchange for 10 packs of smokes and a
homemade shiv.
But in the last 20 years, tattoos have gone mainstream. Now, according
to a 2004 Harris Interactive poll, 16 percent of American adults have
at least one tattoo, and among 18-to-29-year-olds, the figure is 49
percent.
The same poll revealed that 17 percent of Americans who have tattoos
regret getting them.
Those folks are in luck because the science of tattoo removal has
climbed out of the Stone Age. Twenty years ago, if you wanted to remove
Dwayne's name before you married Harry, you had three choices, none
good. You could have Dwayne surgically removed, sliced off with a
scalpel. Or you could have him burned off with acid. Or you could
sandpaper him off with a process called dermabrasion.
"All these techniques," Van Antwerp says, "traded a scar for a tattoo."
But in the early '90s, dermatologists began using the new short-pulse
"Nd:YAG" laser, which can remove tattoos with little or no scarring.
But these lasers aren't cheap: They cost about $100,000. And the
doctors, nurses and physician's assistants who perform the procedure
must be trained and certified.
But if you've got the laser and the license, there's plenty of
business. The American Society for Dermatologic Surgery reports that
tattoo removal procedures increased by 27 percent from 2001 to 2003.
Statistics for 2005 are not complete, but spokeswoman Laura Davis says
the society expects another big increase.
Zapping tattoos can be quite profitable. Prices vary, depending on size
and color (black and red inks are easier to remove; green and light
blue require more treatments). Your average 2-by-2-inch tattoo of "Mom"
in a red heart can be erased in six 10-minute sessions for $1,000 to
$2,000.
That's roughly 10 times what the same tattoo costs to put on. Which is
why tattoo removers tend to be richer than tattoo artists.
"My patients often comment on how much it costs to remove compared to
how much it cost to put on," Van Antwerp says, getting that impish grin
again. "I tell them that they've stumbled onto one of the truths of the
universe: If you take the cost of obtaining a tattoo compared to the
cost of removing it, it's almost exactly the same ratio as the cost of
a marriage license compared to the cost of a divorce. So I tell them
the take-home message is: Think real hard before you get a tattoo or
get married."
Common Denominator
"They almost all use the same words," says David Green. He's a Bethesda
dermatologist and he's talking about the patients who come in to get
tattoos removed. "They say, It's the stupidest thing I ever did. This
could be St. Patrick's Cathedral and I'm Father Green and they're
confessing: Forgive me, Father, this is the stupidest thing I ever
did."
Green, 52, is thumbing through photos of tattoos he has obliterated.
Doctors who do tattoo removal keep albums of before-and-after pictures
to impress prospective patients.
He pauses at a tattooed black panther climbing up a white arm, its
claws digging into the shoulder, leaving tattooed drops of bright red
blood.
"The woman who had this," Green says, "she's a kindergarten teacher."
