My mom said, 'I can't believe you got it on your right arm — and I can't believe it's a dragon,' " Berckley recalls. "At the time, I couldn't wait to get one ... I thought I'd never get tired of it."
By age 22, the tattoo had become "less appealing." When she was married last year, Berckley selected the bare-shouldered wedding dress of her dreams but added shoulder-length gloves to cover the tattoo.
"I started thinking of the way people perceived me; something I didn't think of when I got it," she said.
Berckley paid $100 for her tattoo and will part with close to $3,000 for the removal. Each laser session is about $300. "It's worth it to me to have it removed," she said, while Dr. Stuart Kaplan of Beverly Hills applied gauze to her lasered shoulder. "A little bit of scarring isn't going to bother me as much as the tattoo."
Gilbert Arias, 38, is also a different person than he was at 14, when he got his first tattoo. He is no longer a gang member; he's a phone technician supervisor with a wife and three daughters.
"I'm a family man now," he said recently in Dr. Gary Lask's office at the University of California, Los Angeles' Dermatology Center.
"About seven years ago, I started thinking about removing some of them," he said of his 12 tattoos, which include a teardrop under his left eye, praying hands on his neck (which once landed him in jail because it was similar to a tattoo worn by someone wanted by the police), a peacock on the right arm, "I'll always love my momma" on the left arm and a gang symbol, also on his left arm.
"I grew up," said Arias, who proudly displayed before and after photos of his disappearing tattoos. "And people stereotype people with tattoos."
Tattoos are created when colored pigment is injected into small holes in the dermis, the deep layer of skin under the top layer.
Prior to the advent of high-tech lasers about a decade ago, removing ink from the dermis was a nasty process. Smaller tattoos were usually cut out; larger tattoos were scratched off, along with layers of skin. Scarring, sometimes severe, was inevitable.
Although lasers have been used to remove tattoos for about 10 years, mastery of tattoo removal has been gradual and consumer acceptance of the procedure has been slow.
Now, skilled doctors with the most sophisticated laser equipment can typically remove 95 percent of a tattoo. (Often, barely visible bits of ink remain in the skin.)
Scarring occurs in only about 5 percent of cases because the lasers pass through layers of skin — for the most part without damaging them — to destroy the ink by blasting it into tiny fragments.
"With the laser you aim at a color," Kaplan said. "You set the laser to affect the color you want to reach. The color attracts the laser. The laser goes through the skin and leaves much of the skin and destroys the pigment."
In a demonstration, Kaplan waved the laser over normal skin below Berckley's tattoo. Because the laser was targeted to reach only colors on a blue-black wavelength, nothing happened. When he pointed the laser at the dark blue in her tattoo, the blistering-bleeding reaction occurred.
To reduce the risk of scarring, only a limited amount of laser power is applied per treatment. After each treatment, the tattoo area remains inflamed for several days, then a scab forms and eventually flakes off — sometimes with bits of ink in it. Typically, 10 percent to 20 percent of the tattoo is destroyed with each treatment. Gradually, the tattoo begins to look broken up; solid lines, for example, become dotted lines. Colors fade.
Berckley said one doctor told her he could remove the blue and black inks (the easiest colors to erase) but not the red, turquoise and green. Kaplan, however, says he can remove the vast majority of Berckley's tattoo.
Not all tattoo removals are the same. Some colors change as laser treatments are applied. Green and yellow are particularly resistant to complete erasure. And because tattoos applied with machines deposit more ink into the skin, they're more difficult to remove than those applied with a needle.
Although small black tattoos sometimes require only three or four treatments, larger tattoos can need as many as 10, Lask said.
With patience, repeated treatments will usually remove most of the tattoo. But progress is somewhat unpredictable.
"When you tell people you can remove a tattoo now without scarring, they say, 'Oh good, now I can get one without having to worry about that.' But it's not that simple," Lask said.
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