By: Dr. Craig Crippen

Erase Your Mistakes – Tattoo Removal

Getting a tattoo is one heck of a commitment. I admit, I don’t actually have one myself. I’ve always thought that if I’m going to go ahead and get a tattoo, that it better be something of such great significance that I won’t regret having it on my body for the rest of my life.  Can you erase your mistakes once they are done?  Let’s have a look.


Erase your mistakes with laser tattoo removal: A Real DermMedica patient.

erase tattoo mistakes with laser tattoo removal beforeerase tattoo mistakes with laser tattoo removal after

So many options, so few good ones” is what I’d keep saying to friends who ask me why I don’t have any tattoos yet. Even though the ever-popular “your child’s name” keeps popping up as a suggestion (I have no kids, by the way), I kept thinking about how creeped out I’d feel if I knew my mother had tattooed my name somewhere on her body.

That didn’t stop my friend Sara from getting her boyfriend Mark’s name tattooed alongside a heart with wings (so original, right?) on her left shoulder. “It’s as close to my heart as I can get it” she explained of the tattoo’s location. Oh, wait, did I say “boyfriend”? I meant “ex-boyfriend”!  Erase your mistakes by looking into how to remove this kind of thing.

A few months ago, when Mark and Sara officially called it quits, she was heartbroken. I’d inject a “pardon the pun” here, but it isn’t quite a pun at all. Sara was completely distraught over what to do about the ink that seemed forever embedded on her upper back. “What am I supposed to do now?” she kept asking.

In all honestly, I didn’t have much of an answer for her. I really didn’t know much about tattoos, let alone tattoo removal. It’s a good thing we looked into it though. Sara is a great friend and a wonderful person but I’d be lying to you if I said that she is a good judge of character.

Mark was a nice guy, but I can’t say I was his biggest fan. He just never gave me the impression that he was as into Sara as she was into him. I mean, to my knowledge, he didn’t have any “Sara” tattoos to get rid of. So, needless to say, I was incensed when I learned that Sara was trying to get back with him.

Rebuilding the relationship, it seemed, was thought to be a less inconvenient way to solve the unwanted tattoo problem. Not that I needed to convince her of otherwise anyway, but her plans were immediately foiled. Mark had moved on, no doubt on his way to having another girl make a huge mistake.  You CAN erase your mistakes, sometimes at least.

Thankfully, for Sara, tattoo removal isn’t as harrowing as one may think. A tattoo’s ink sits in the dermis layer of the skin. The removal process utilizes a laser that breaks up the ink particles, helping to dissolve the tattoo – and any misjudgments you may have once made.

With the painless procedure behind her, Sara is now working on getting over the pain of a broken heart. And she’s doing quite well actually. She’s seeing someone new. And she’s seeing things clearer as well. She insists that there are no tattoos of a boyfriend’s name anywhere in her future!