Inside Vancouver
The Tattoo Removal Business
By Steve Burgess published Feb 2, 2012
Your Khao San Road-acquired tattoo isn't looking as cool as it did at that Full Moon Party; now what? A Vancouver ear, nose, and throat doctor has turned a quarter of his clinic workload into the business of removing people's inky regrets.
A physiotherapist, Lindsay McLeod is used to staying alert for the flinches and yelps that identify a client’s tolerance for pain. Today, however, it is McLeod who’s lying on her stomach, whimpering as a black wand runs over her lower back. A staccato click accompanies the tiny red light as it traces one wing of her elaborate black butterfly tattoo. “Okay, stop,” she says. She’s 15 painful seconds into a removal process that will likely take years.
Dr. Donald Mintz straightens and adjusts his safety glasses, waiting for McLeod to catch her breath. A 60-year-old otolaryngologist who arrived in Vancouver three decades ago with a specialty in head and neck cancer surgery, Mintz has been involved with laser surgery since he joined Arbutus Laser Centre shortly after it opened in the early ’90s. These days he splits his time between Arbutus and his own ear, nose, and throat practice. At first most of his laser work involved a procedure to reduce snoring. But over the last 20 years the tattoo removal sector of the laser trade has been growing steadily—it now represents at least a quarter of his clinic workload. (Some of this is pro bono work: cancer patients are often given small tattoos that allow proper positioning of the radiation machines. The clinic, like many, will remove them without charge.)
Mintz waits patiently as McLeod composes herself. She puts her head down and gives the okay. As the stuttering begins again, her toes curl. “I’m going over the lower part, which is going to be more painful,” he warns. “The lower you go, the more sensitive it is.”
McLeod’s butterfly is done in a stylized tribal design, acquired in Nanaimo at the tender, inkable age of 16. “It was a big trend at the time,” she says, “butterflies and the tribal thing.” The large black insect was marked for death when she began to understand that this particular badge of individuality, located on this particular part of the anatomy, had developed another meaning. In popular slang, it was the “tramp stamp.” “Tattoo on the lower back?” sneers Vince Vaughn in the 2005 movie Wedding Crashers. “Might as well be a bull’s-eye.” This is her third visit to Arbutus Laser. “I just grew out of it,” she says. “Trends go out of style.”
The tattoo wave that has swept the world since the late ’80s may have taken skin art into the mainstream (one study found 80 percent of parlour clients were upper-middle-class white suburban females) and resulted in an explosion of tattoo parlours—close to 50 Lower Mainland shops are listed on Yelp. But as those human canvases age, the parallel business of tattoo removal has been booming. Vancouver listings reveal at least a dozen local removal clinics, such as Surrey’s Unwanted Ink and BC Laser and Skin Care. Nor will they be running out of ink to remove anytime soon. A 2009 Christian Science Monitor story suggests tattoo parlours did well even during the depths of the recession, noting that the Tattoo Nation chain was able to both expand and raise prices during the downturn. The story quoted a 2006 survey indicating 36 percent of 18-to-25-year-olds and 40 percent of those 26 to 40 had tattoos.
Still, the popularity of individual tattoos seems to undergo a predictable decline: tattoo in haste, repent at painful leisure. Pressure to remove tattoos can come from anywhere. For some the issue is job-related, as they move into professional or retail fields where skin art can project an unwanted image. Just as common, though, is the embarrassing realization that a loving tribute to your prince has turned into a frog souvenir. “There are a lot of engaged women who do not want to walk down the aisle to meet Paul while wearing a ‘John Forever’ tattoo,” Mintz says. “We see a lot of that.”
