Ow! And it’s ta-ta to the tattoo
IT hurts, but like they say, pain is beauty.
I’m at the Sacred Tattoo studio in Auckland, enduring what feels like rubber-band snaps on my shoulder. Hundreds of them. The laser whacks against my skin like the fat from a pan of sausages. For 10 minutes I count depressions in the ceiling tiles as 10 blasts per second of high energy light penetrate my dermis, smashing ink into tiny particles to be carried away by the immune system.
Tattoos are unlike children in that you can change them forcibly and with relative ease – now more than ever before. It’s not that I have an ex-lover’s name to be scoured, in fact my original tattoo is a beautiful piece.
But to make way for a new one – inspired by Sacred’s work on long-time client Israel McDean, drummer for Kiwi hardcore band Antagonist AD – I have to shed an old one.
Once located at the beating heart of Auckland’s K Rd, Sacred now occupies a refurbished villa on the periphery of Kingsland. The room where Briar Neville, partner of Sacred co-owner and artist Dan Andersen, removes tattoos is comfortable room: small, well-lit, sterile without being nauseatingly antiseptic. ‘‘He puts them on, I take them off,’’ she says.
And then sometimes he puts them back on again. I ask which hurts more, his needles or her laser.
‘‘Most people would probably say the laser, but the sessions are much shorter. As little as five minutes, sometimes. If you can handle a tattoo you can handle the laser,’’ she says.
‘‘Some people say it’s like a rubber-band slap, which is what I generally tell clients, and some people say it’s like bacon splatter, which sounds a bit gross.’’
For me it’s a rubber band, one of those big thick ones, and it’s been heated in oil.
Sacred utilises an impressive pain management mechanism called the Zimmer machine, blasting the concerned area with cold air. The skin is chilled to an almost painfully low temperature, numbing the sensation.
‘‘You can also expect pinpoint bleeding, and later you are going to get quite swollen, which is why we only treat a certain-sized area,’’ Neville says.
‘‘We’d never remove an entire arm band or ring. If you were to laser a ring – the entire circumference – you can potentially cut off the blood and lose the finger.
‘‘Then, because we’ve created a thermal injury, we want to keep it clean but not cover it up. It’d be like putting a lid on a pot of boiling water. I’ve seen some horror stories where people have been cling-film wrapped after a procedure and it’s just cooked the skin.’’
‘ I’ve become almost like a therapist . . . it can be quite an emotional process.’ BRIAR NEVILLE
Cling-film! What maniac out there is treating freshly lasered skin like a common bakery sandwich? But cowboys abound in this industry, says Neville. Beauty salons, perhaps proficient at blasting off pubic hairs and errant whiskers, have in recent times turned their lasers on the tattooed and unwary.
‘‘There are some clinics that are like ‘Hey, we’ve got this laser, let’s just use it on something we’re totally inexperienced with and untrained in’,’’ says Neville. ‘‘They end up hurting people, giving them giant keloid scarring and so on. There was one kid who would have needed skin grafts to fix what happened to him.’’
Tattoo removal occurs by a process where the laser reduces the ink particles beneath the skin to a manageable size which can then be gradually dealt with by the body’s natural filtering and immune systems. Sacred’s laser tattoos have been removed completely.
‘‘It’s pretty full-on getting your face tattooed,’’ he said. ‘‘You can’t hide it. And people change.’’
Work and Income sometimes covers the cost of the removal of facial tattoos, and Sacred has seen many clients rehabilitating from gang life or prison.
For Neville, who has treated everyone from reformed mobsters to divorced wives, her role has evolved since first picking up the laser. ‘‘I’ve become almost like a therapist,’’ she says.
‘‘Tattoos mean a lot to people, whether it’s a name of someone they used to love or a reminder of a particularly bad time in their life, and so it can be quite an emotional process.’’
In a world of body shaming and self-critique, the guilt and regret of a bad tattoo can eating away at self-esteem. Compared to that, what is the pain of a laser?