THAT INKING FEELING
While some are prepared to hide their body art for the office, others are going to great lengths — and expense — to get it removed.
ASIX-FOOT Macedonian roars into Parkhurst in a flame-tailed Pontiac and lumbers, all limbs, into SA Hardcore Tattoos. Pain. Hurt. That’s what Pepi Dimevski’s fists shout. So does his phone. A lackey splutters into it: “I’ve got a waiting list as long as my arm.” Try three months.
“Sugar with your espresso?” Lackey asks an executive, who slides onto a bed beneath a rosary-adorned Virgin Mary for her weekly date with pain. Eyes dart from her face to the mirror image on her shoulder and back. It’s the ultimate selfie. On skin.
“I wanted a tattoo sleeve, so I decided that for the rest of my life at work, even in heat waves, I’ll just have to wear a jacket,” says Anonymous, 27, who holds a senior role in financial services. That way she always looks professional. It’s win-win.
Sometimes, in a meeting, her cuffs slide over a sliver of colour. Gives her a little thrill. Truth is, some of her clients have tats too, but she still conceals hers. “You’ll always have people who think, ‘Ooh, that’s a person from the devil.’ ” But really, tatted-up jobhunters should score. “It shows employers you have balls.”
Manicured nails trace the compass on her wrist. She just quit drinking. “I see it every time I hold a glass. It reminds me where I want to go in life. It’s daily therapy. The koi represent my boyfriend. He’s crazy about fish.”
A short drive from this leather-worn den of Pink Floyd and crucifixes, in a bleached Dunkeld clinic, another businesswoman bares her tattoo — to have it erased. She may run a catering firm now, but the tattoo still brands her a gang member.
She cried when she saw the image fade.
“I like to think I can make a difference,” says Mazanne van Staden, an aesthetician at Laserderm, a beauty clinic with 13 branches. Tattoo removal is one of her most popular treatments. She shows me photographs of some of the tats she’s zapped — over 1 000. “I call it my wall of fame.” A mom marched in her daughter, 16, who had “Up in the clouds” etched on her in memory of her dad. “To the girl, it was meaningful. To her mother, it was a big, fat black cloud on her daughter’s neck.”
But teens are rare — most of her clients are aged 22 to 30. Their common refrain: “I was young and stupid. Now I want it off.” Like yesterday. One man tried hot condensed milk before he came here.
IT SHOWS EMPLOYERS YOU HAVE BALLS
“Burnt himself to pieces.” From air hostesses to corporate highflyers, like the businessman who kept his hands in his pockets to hide the expletives on his fingers, about a quarter of her clients want tats removed because they’re careerlimiting.
There’s a sound like the buzz of a tattoo needle as Van Staden, slipping on dark glasses, cocks her laser gun and fires. Since methods like dermabrasion, where skin is scoured with a metal brush, fell from grace, Q-switched laser is touted as the Porsche of tattoo annihilation tech, Sandton dermatologist Dr Lushen Pillay tells me.
Yet it’s not free of pain — one client says it hurts as much as it did getting the tat — or risks. “Tattoos are meant to be permanent. Swelling, blistering and bleeding can occur. We warn people it can look a lot worse before it looks better.”
Even then, you’ll be left with a textural change or bruised effect, says Van Staden. “But unless I show you, you won’t realise it was a tattoo.”
Tats on the ankle? Terrible. “High risk of scarring.” It’s also one of the most common areas where her clients have them. The older and lighter the tattoo, the harder it is to remove. “Ask yourself: is it worth it if you can only fade it? I’d rather have a tattoo than something that kinda looks like one.”
Technology has boomed to meet demand. For instance: “Ten years ago, we couldn’t touch dark skin.” In this arena, they still have some way to go. “I have a client with her exboyfriend’s name on both bum cheeks.” The tattoo comes out fine, but she’s left with the words in blazing white: Bongani. Bongani. It can take a few months for the skin to re-pigment.
Van Staden arches a plucked eyebrow. “I’m brutally honest with clients because their skin was compromised and it will never be perfect again. You can take off a nose ring, but you can’t just take off a tattoo.”
In a job-scarce climate, many would rather take their chances. But they’ll have to make do with concealing the tattoo under clothes or make-up at work for 18 months to two years. That’s how long it takes to remove a palm-sized tat inked in an afternoon.
She prefers not to take on bigger, although, says Dimevski: “Today the tattoo industry is so huge, people are only getting big tattoos. It’s more a culture than a fashion like it was.”
A tattoo that would have cost a few hundred to R1 500 to put on will set you back about R9 000 to remove. This could double if you’re prone to keloid scarring.
Treatments, up to 20, are spaced between healing intervals of several weeks. To one of her many last-minute brides who hoped to be tat-free for the big day, she said: “Seven months? Not gonna happen, babe.”
“Laserable” ink is in the pipeline, although, she says with a laugh, what tattoo artist will use it? She does, however, get referrals to fade or partially remove tattoos for cover-ups, for some, an alternative to laser.
But not everyone will agree to do that, says let’s-call-him-Bob, who had a few artists turn him down. “Picasso wouldn’t want to paint on a used canvas.” He wishes he could go back to the day he got the tattoo: a Ferrari insignia. “I was 19. I f***ed up.”
After one botched cover-up, he lived with a splotch on his back, like a tropical fungus, for years, before settling on the current incarnation. “It’s not a fire bird okay, but it’s basically a bird, and it’s angry-lookin’.” It’s double the size of the mother tattoo. “If you look in the bird’s eye, you can see a bit of chrome.”
His grandfather got a tattoo in the army. “He was ashamed of it his whole life. But now you walk through Sandton City and everyone has them.” Thanks to Angelina Jolie and David Beckham, perhaps, tats have become so vanilla you’re unique if you don’t have one. You wonder if Boity’s bare bottom would’ve caused such a stir if roses bloomed on her cheeks like Cheryl Cole’s. It’s not just arse antlers anymore. Tats have more personal meaning now, I keep hearing, perhaps because the art has evolved — you can get a 3D tat of your cat.
They’ve gone from rebel’s badge to penpusher’s accessory, but, says Tanja Koch of recruitment agency DAV, getting inked isn’t yet a day at the office. Unless it’s an interview for a creative post, rather cover up.
“If you have a tattoo on your forehead, no employer would be criticised for saying that’s not the image they want to portray,” says labour-law specialist Jeremy Crawford. But it’s like saying someone’s too fat. “You might think it, but you’re not gonna say it.”
No one has taken the boss to task yet over tat discrimination, although Crawford is itching to take on a case. If the courts defend employees for cultural reasons, such as wearing dreadlocks, why not tattoos? “I mean, people have been tattooing themselves since they painted on cave walls.”
“Do you have a tattoo?” I ask Koch before we hang up. Oh no. “I’m still deciding what to get.”
PICASSO WOULDN’T WANT TO PAINT ON A USED CANVAS