Removal not cure-all for regrettable art
By Kelly Kennedy
Times staff writer
Sitting in Johnny Lange’s chair getting a tattoo, customers can see a Saturday Evening Post cover from 1945 hanging on his wall.
A sailor sits gripping his hands as a tattoo artist inks “Betty” into his bicep.
But the sailor in the poster has obviously been to the tattoo parlor before: Above “Betty” are several other women’s names — with lines crossing them out.
“That’s bad luck,” said Lange, who does his work in Arlington, Va. “If you want to get rid of someone, just get their name tattooed on your body.”
The poster serves as a warning against quick tattoo decisions.
A couple of miles away, Dr. Kurt Maggio removes those “mistakes” at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington.
“Come hell or high water, they want them gone,” Maggio said. “If we took all the patients who want their tattoos removed, we’d be here every night until midnight.”
Maggio sees 15 people a week for tattoo removal, and treats members of all services, as well as civilian dependents. A typical treatment in the outside world costs a few hundred dollars per visit, but military members get the service free at Walter Reed.
A woman recently had an ankle tattoo removed because it showed with her uniform skirt; another burned off her tattooed wedding ring and dozens of people have erased pieces of their history that no longer apply: racist propaganda, gang symbols or even crosses pricked in by a friend with a sewing needle.
“A lot that we remove are a situation where the tattoo casts the service member in an unfortunate light,” Maggio said. “For example, a soldier on presidential detail had a tattoo removed because it showed below the Class A short-sleeve shirt.”
That was allowed under the Army’s tattoo policy even before it changed, but the soldier thought it made him appear unprofessional, Maggio said.
A recent policy change allows soldiers to ink the backs of their necks and their hands, as well as allowing female soldiers the option of permanent makeup.
A quick reaction to that policy change might be a long line outside tattoo parlors close to bases, but Maggio advises people to think about it first.
For service members, tattoo removal is free with a referral from their commanders, but that doesn’t mean they don’t pay a price.
It hurts.
It’s time-consuming.
And it doesn’t always work.
“I would say the majority of neck and hand tattoos are amateurs done with India ink, which means they’re relatively easy to remove,” Maggio said. “But if it’s a multicolored tattoo, we don’t generally embark on that.”
Maggio said he uses a laser beam to shatter the pigment in the tattoo, and then the body absorbs the ink. Black tattoos are easy because black absorbs all color. But for color tattoos, Maggio must use a complementary light — or a laser colored on the opposite side of the color wheel from the tattoo color. Otherwise, the tattoo won’t absorb the light that breaks it down.
“Green is the hardest because they don’t have a really good laser red light,” Maggio said.
Amateur tattoos, or those done with a needle and a bottle of India ink, also contain less ink, so they don’t require as many treatments. A normal tattoo usually takes 10 visits to Maggio’s office to fade away completely.
For one dependent who hoped to join the Army, laser-beam treatments did not work to erase letters from his fingers even after four tries. So Maggio decided to cut the letters out of the recruit’s hand.
“If it’s small, less than two or three inches across, we excise them,” he said. “We trace the border, remove the skin, then sew the skin back together. I do at least one of those a week.”
The updated regulation permitting tattoos on necks and hands also allows permanent makeup, or etched-on eyeliner, eyebrows and lips. But Maggio doesn’t recommend it.
“That’s a bad idea in general,” he said. “That is very hard to get rid of, and the satisfaction rate of permanent makeup is very low.”
As people age, he said, their eyebrows, lip lines and eyes change, and the contours of the tattoo and the actual feature might no longer match.
“That looks bad,” Maggio said. “Don’t do that.”