Five tattoos you should never get
NZ’s most-lasered tattoos revealed, and why laser operators hate reality shows about tattoo artists. Catherine Hubbard reports.
‘Nobody gets a tattoo with the idea that they’re going to get it off. If they do they’re idiots,’’ says tattoo removal specialist Helena Carter.
‘‘People assume yeah, yeah, yeah it’ll come off, but that’s actually not true. It’s expensive. It’s painful.
‘‘And it’s not without risk.’’ That might be the case, but for those going under the needle, hearing the which and whereabouts of New Zealand’s most-lasered-off tattoos may help ink enthusiasts make better decisions about where and what to get etched.
Names
Carter, who runs her own Auckland tattoo removal business deINK, says top of the list are names.
By names, she means names of exes: ex-husbands, ex-wives, exgirlfriends, ex-boyfriends: ‘‘exwhoever’’, as well as reminders of former flames in other guises.
‘‘People get crazy about tattoos that aren’t even horrible,’’ she says.
‘‘They might have gotten it because XYZ boyfriend said, ‘get this tattoo’ and now XYZ boyfriend is shacked up with someone else with five kids, so that tattoo is a constant reminder. I get lots of stories like that, male and female.’’
Tattooed wedding rings
Tattooed wedding rings top the lists of the most commonly removed tattoos of both Carter, and Nelson Laser Clinic owner Wanda Doocey.
Tattoos on the bottom of the lower back.
A lot of people want tattoos removed from that area, Doocey says, because of how they are perceived these days.
Carter said removing the socalled ‘‘tramp stamp’’ was extremely painful because there ‘‘a lot of nerves around the spine’’.
Tattoos on extremities
Fingers, hands and feet are not more difficult, but they just take longer, Doocey says.
One of Carter’s clients was a 60-year-old Pacific Island woman who had ‘‘home job’’ tattoos on her hands and worked in a doctor’s office.
She was so self-conscious about her tattoos that she was embarrassed when she had to take someone’s credit card at the reception.
‘‘The wrong tattoo can knock your confidence and leave you scarred for life,’’ Carter says.
Colours
‘‘Pale blues and greens are probably the hardest colours to remove,’’ says Doocey.
Carter would not recommend lighter colours, such as yellow and white, because they are invisible to the laser and thus are tricky to erase.
Other things to consider:
The pain of the laser has been compared to getting splattered by hot oil.
However, both Carter and Doocey use a skin cooling machine, which reportedly reduces the pain by up to 80%.
Doocey has had clients from across the age range, from a 14-yearold whose mum brought them in ‘‘because they’d put a tattoo on themselves’’ right out to a 70-yearold who had had the tattoo for more than 50 years.
People don’t always want to get rid of the tattoos, she says.
‘‘Some people just want to have their tattoos lightened so that they can have something better or different put over the top.’’
That includes tattoo artists, who are running out of room on their well-inked canvases, and whose work has evolved as they gained experience as artists.
‘‘I don’t judge what people have on their skin,’’ she says. ‘‘I’m just here to remove them.’’
Carter has a favourite type of tattoo to remove: Home jobs, because they’ll normally come off after one or two treatments.
‘‘When you’re digging a needle into yourself, you don’t go very deep. They are definitely my favourite.’’
Her other preferred jobs are when the client wants a tattoo lightened for a cover-up, ‘‘because the pressure’s off to try and take it off completely’’, something that is not always achievable.
Doocey is often asked if she watches television reality shows about tattoo artists.
‘‘I can’t watch them because I get so annoyed with them,’’ she says.
‘‘I’ll say to my husband, ‘oh my goodness, look how tiny that tattoo is, did you know I could get that off in two or three treatments?’ And the poor person ends up having this enormous big tattoo that’s really thick and bright and dark to cover a tiny little name or something that’s the size of a matchbox.
‘‘I always say to my husband, ‘why do they do something so big or dark?’ And it’s because they have to do that to cover up what’s there. Whereas if you have a tattoo removal treatment with me to lighten it, then you can have something better put over the top.’’
Lightening the tattoo makes the tattoo artist’s job much easier ‘‘because then they can do the quality artwork that they’re capable of and not try to draw a picture over top of a picture’’, she says.
Some tattoos stand out for those who erase them. The image that Carter says she ‘‘dines out on’’ was a photograph of a marijuana leaf, complete with eyes and a mouth with a joint hanging out of it.
‘‘It was a really ugly tattoo. I mean, a mind-blowingly ugly tattoo.’’ Intrigued, Carter felt compelled to ask: ‘‘Are you a bit of a dope enthusiast, are you?’’
‘‘And he goes, ‘No, no, I don’t smoke dope at all’. And I went ‘Well, why? Why? Why? Why?’
‘‘And he says, ‘Well, it hurt so much and I was lying on my tummy while he was doing it, I never saw it. I just let the tattooist do whatever’.’’
She herself doesn’t have any tattoos: ‘‘It’s not because I am scared of ink, I’m scared of pain.’’
‘‘I just can’t get my head around why you would sit there and let someone inflict pain on you for a couple of hours or more.
‘‘And not to mention, God, there’s no-one else I would trust with laser here in Auckland to take my tattoo off if I didn’t like it.’’ Doocey doesn’t either. Their stock and trade took a hit over Covid-19 and vaccine mandates, but isn’t about to disappear anytime soon.
‘‘I don’t think I’m going to run out of business. Because as fast as I’m taking them off, people are having them put on.’’