“I wanted to join all my clients with their experiences,” she says drily. Cazzetta, who is heavily tattooed, knows this first-hand: she had an ex-boyfriend’s name tattooed on her body, then had it lasered off after the breakup. With darker inks, the laser can have phenomenal results: the tattoo simply vanishes, as if it was never there. Visitors to the clinic are increasingly seeking to have their old tattoos removed and replaced by handiwork from artists more talented than the one who did the original tattoo. “They will go down in potency,” says Cazzatta, “and look like a bruise.” Some clients choose to cover up these faded remnants with a new tattoo others are simply happy for their old ink to be barely visible. Pink, yellow, and white are the most stubborn colours to remove a practitioner may be able to fade them considerably, but a trace will remain.
#LIVING ART TATTOO SKIN#
“The way tattoo removal works,” Cazzetta says, “is that the laser breaks down the ink into very small particles, and the blood that flows under the skin takes away the ink.” The laser works on all skin types with black ink, but it can cause pigmentation – a permanent change to the colour of the skin – with coloured tattoos on black skin. Tattoos like Smith’s, she explains, pose a challenge, because pink is especially tricky to remove. Cazzetta is a smiling and ebullient presence with more than a decade’s experience in laser tattoo removal. “But I felt like getting this removed was very worth it for me.” Astonishingly, despite all this, she doesn’t regret the tattoo, and says it serves as a learning curve for her children.īeside her, practitioner Rene Cazzetta is programming the laser to the correct setting. (Most tattoos take a number of sessions to be removed.) “I was shocked at how much it cost,” Smith says. She is halfway through a course of six treatments, at a cost of £600, and her tattoo is much faded, although still visible. Or culottes, which I don’t really like, but I wear because they cover the tattoo.” I’m forever trying to cover it with the perfect length dress, and midi dresses aren’t my thing. “Over the years,” she says, “it has just ruined every summer. She’s having it lasered off so that she no longer has to worry about covering it when the weather gets warm. “The regret kicked in as I got older,” Smith says.
#LIVING ART TATTOO FULL#
“But it ended up being massive.” Smith can’t even remember why she got the strawberry tattoo – she is not particularly keen on the fruit but was 18 at the time, a wannabe Camden scene kid with tattoos, a face full of piercings, and an extreme haircut. “It was only a small tattoo I wanted,” Smith sighs. In all honesty, she’s making the right call. It is the size of a baby’s head, badly rendered in wobbly fluorescent pink. I contemplate the offending soft fruit, on Smith’s left calf. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian Rene Cazzetta works on Roy Sword’s arrow tattoo. “I remember I was walking down the street,” says the 30-year-old social work student, from east London, “and someone said: ‘She’s got a strawberry on her leg!’ I think that did it for me.”
In an adjacent treatment room, Candice Smith is having a youthful indiscretion scrubbed clean. “We’re impulsive,” says Brierly when asked what she has learned from her career. And then, of course, there are names – heartbreak is always good business for the tattoo-removal trade. (Samantha Cameron has one on her foot.) More recently, Brierly has had clients coming in to have full sleeves removed, as the 2010s trend beloved of footballers and social media influencers burns itself out. “Tramp stamps” – a tattoo on a woman’s lower back – are also routinely sandblasted away, as are dolphins, another relic of the 90s. The most common tattoos Brierly removes, however, are tribal designs out of favour since their 90s heyday. There was just one problem: he rediscovered his faith. He’d gotten divorced and was a Muslim.” As some Muslims believe tattoos are forbidden, she thinks they were his way of declaring he didn’t want to be a Muslim any more. “One guy did practically his whole body,” she says.
Or camel drawn on a toe.” As a tattoo remover, Brierly has a direct line into the shifting vagaries of the human psyche.
Probably the worst tattoos Brierly has removed were the terrible jokes: “‘Tupac’ written across the stomach,” she says.
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