In 1982, after her parents’ divorce, Nicole Colbert was a 15-year-old New York City transplant in Madison, Wisconsin. Her solution to teenage angst among the cheeseheads was getting a black-widow spider tattooed on her upper arm. By 1989, the spider didn’t jibe with her nascent teaching career, so she went to a plastic surgeon to get it removed and was informed that the only option at that time was cutting out her skin and rocking a large scar instead of a spider. So there were a few more years of long sleeves until, in 1995, a laser became available that could remove the dubious artwork.
“Think about the decisions you made when you were 15,” says Colbert, now a dance-theater artist. “How many of them would you like to stick with for the rest of your life?”
More than a few Americans agree. According to the Pew Research Center, 32 percent of adults have at least one tattoo (surprisingly, 38 percent of women to 27 percent of men), and the numbers have risen steadily in the past few decades. But what goes up must come down—or off: the tattoo-removal business is booming. For example, Removery, founded in 2019, has 152 tattoo-removal studios in the U.S., Canada, and Australia. The company reports 1.5 million treatments and a 25 percent growth in new clients within the last year.
“There are endless reasons people remove or fade their tattoos,” says Carmen VanderHeiden Brodie, Removery’s co-founder. “Some people get tattoos when they are young, and it no longer suits their lifestyle. Some feel it’s affecting their professional goals.” (Though it didn’t seem to affect Pete Hegseth, our new secretary of defense. His Christian-nationalist tattoos—the Jerusalem cross and the Latin Deus Vult, which translates to “God wills it”—are associated with white-supremacist groups … and he was confirmed anyway. We’ve come a long way from Winston Churchill’s inked anchor.)
Another common reason? The tattooed name of a beloved who is no longer in the picture. Megan Fox has shaded over a pelvic tattoo reading Brian—her former husband, Brian Austin Green—with a flower-and-snake design. On Instagram, reality star Christina Hall, of Christina on the Coast fame, proudly held up her left finger, where a doctor was removing her ring tattoo commemorating her now nixed union with husband Josh Hall, a real-estate agent. Sometimes it’s simply that the tattoo was not the best signifier for a heartfelt emotion.
“Think about the decisions you made when you were 15. How many of them would you like to stick with for the rest of your life?”
Khloé Kardashian decided she had to remove a tramp stamp dedicated to … her late father. She wrote on Instagram during the removal process, “I should’ve listened to Kim when she told me, ‘You don’t put a bumper sticker on a Bentley.’”
Tattoos can also be a reminder of a darker time. As Pete Davidson put it to Jimmy Fallon when explaining why he was getting almost all of his 200 tats burned off, “Yeah, I was a sad boy.”
David Ores, a tatted G.P. who practices on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, runs Fresh Start Tattoo Removal. The program is designed to remove visible markings from the hands, neck, and face of the formerly incarcerated, gang members, and women who’ve been sex-trafficked. Often “when you’re in prison, getting a tattoo is not optional,” Ores says. “You’ll die or be killed if you don’t” affiliate yourself with a gang to protect you. Similarly, women who’ve been sex-trafficked are often tattooed with the name of their trafficker, a vulgarity on their stomach, or a barcode. “You’re owned, like a cow,” Ores adds.
Some organizations, such as Removery and New Beginnings, a program sponsored by the American Society for Laser Medicine and Surgery offer free removal treatment for cancer survivors who want to get rid of the permanent dots on their body that show technicians where to aim during radiation treatment. “Some survivors see the dots as symbols of their resilience,” says VanderHeiden Brodie. “But others find the markings to be a relentless reminder of their experience battling cancer.”
There’s no getting around it: tattoo removal costs more than the original tattoo, and it hurts a lot more, too. That whole notion that a laser is like “snapping a rubber band”? Please. It’s more like a delightful combo of electric shock and fire. Luckily, there is topical lidocaine. (Ask for it.) The cost is determined by the size of the tattoo and the number of sessions necessary to get rid of it, or at least fade it. Average at Removery: 10 sessions, with each lasting about five minutes, for a total of $1,750. And you may look rough for a while, particularly if you’re Black or brown. “The laser breaks up the melanin as well as the ink,” notes Ores. “But 95 percent of the time, your skin comes back to its normal shade.”
Some psychologists believe the pain of removal may serve a psychic purpose. “Tattoos become a way of taking emotional and physical pain from the past and getting a handle on it.... You endure the pain for the pleasure of creating something beautiful,” says Jane Greer, a Manhattan psychologist who has noticed that extensive neck, face, and back tattooing (we’re not talking the occasional butterfly here) is associated with some form of trauma.
Conversely, Greer adds, “When the tattoo itself has painful memories associated with it, you embrace that pain [of removal] because you know it’s a step towards emancipation.”
Nuking regrettable tattoos doesn’t always quash the desire for more tattoos—particularly when you have a less-than-talented tattoo artist and realize you can upgrade.
“I guess I was having a bit of a midlife crisis, so I got three more tattoos recently,” says Colbert. Small. Discreet. Definitely not goth. “But there was one on my inner arm that said, Je t’aime. I was having a crisis of confidence, so I thought a reminder of self-love would do the trick.” It was, Colbert readily admits, cringe-worthy. She found a tattoo artist in Astoria who covered it with a peony and a rose (for her grandmother Rose) that she adores.
Inevitably there are some—contrarians? romantics? —who can never see their way clear to removing a tattoo. Among his tats, Mark Ebner, the veteran journalist, has the flag of his home state, Rhode Island; his beloved pit bull; and … a woman he was engaged to more than 30 years ago. After things went south, and after a year of having the tissue box passed his way at the therapist’s office, he was ready to say a proper buh-bye to his body art.
But then … he wasn’t. “So I just had this tattoo artist write over it in black letters: Void.”
Ebner understands why people remove tattoos that remind them of the pain of a violent past. But the pain of love lost? In his mind, this is perhaps a bond that you should never break. “There’s a reason you made a stupid decision 25 years ago,” he said. “You don’t want to erase it. It’s part of your story.”
Judith Newman is a New York–based writer and the author of To Siri with Love
