First I want to set the stage and let you know how good you have it in this day of modern medicine and technology.  You’ll hear people complain about the pain and expense of tatoo removal, but in reality it’s a walk in the park compared to what it used to be.

Dermabrasion Tatoo Removal

Yikes!  This is another way to say “we’re going to sand your skin off”.  Yep.  The procedure is very painful and requires a general anesthesia for all but the tiniest skin areas.  Modern dermatology makes use of a CO2 laser to perform the operation instead of an actual electric sander, but the main advantage is less bleeding.  The pain is still quite real and quite excruciating.  You’ll notice when you run your hand over your tatoo that it is slightly raised up.  The “sanding” basically smoothes it back down and removes the pigmented skin.  A real joy.

Salabrasion

A close relative of dermabrasion, this method uses salt as the scrubbing medium rather than sandpaper.  Salt, as you probably already know, is very damaging to tatoo ink, and can have better results than the sanding alone.  Especially when it’s rubbed down in there with an electric oscillating instrument.  Oh, and it will break the skin and you will get salt in the wound.  Think about it.

Cryosurgery

This is a fancy term for freezing the top layer of your skin until it dies.  Once that’s complete, the doctor can focus on the next layer down, then the next, then the next.  And so on and so forth.  It’s the same idea as freezing a wart off your foot, just extrapolated to a larger area.  And if you multiply the area, you’re multiplying the pain as well.  And while probably more desirable than the dermabrasion, it still has its fair share of pain involved and is no quicker.

Tatoo Removal with Excision

This is nothing more than cutting the tatoo off your body.  For large tatoos it is probably not the most ideal technique due to the need for skin grafts, but it can be done and is quite effective.

All this sound like a good time?  I can’t speak from first hand experience, but I do have a lot of stories from people who have, and it’s no picnic.  And while these methods are still used today, we do have more civilized tatoo removal methods that are much more popular.  We’ll talk about all of them soon.