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Tattoo removal is a pretty painful process, as Paul McNulty discovered

Martin sits on the plush armchair in the waiting room of the Berkley Clinic surrounded by skincare creams and the latest in hair removal products. A buzzing noise, faint but insistent, comes from the next room, through a door covered in a giant poster advertising a laser treatment for acne. It is one of those insidious, bluebottle in a darkened bedroom kind of buzzes, one that buries its way deep into your consciousness.
  
“I’m in here to get this yoke off my arm; I got it when I was 17 and a bloody eejit.” Martin sighs. He looks at his forearm and grimaces ruefully at the spindly ‘Saoirse-IRA’ which stretches from his elbow to just above his wrist. The ‘i’ of Saoirse branches off to form the word ‘IRA’. It’s in classic tattoo blue, and while it’s clear and legible, there’s something shaky or spidery about it. It looks like it was written with the tattooist’s left hand. “Myself and a couple of the lads from my estate were on holidays in Lanzarote six years ago and we all got tattoos in a dive of a place. It was beside a pub we were drinking in. It cost €40 and I was delighted with myself for a while, but it’s holding me back a lot now.”
 
The reason for his spindly tattoo now becomes clear - the tattoo ‘artist’ obviously saw this group of boozy Irish lads as a bonanza and zipped through them before any of them changed their minds. It’s not just people under the influence like Martin who regret their body art. David Beckham has his wife’s name written in Sanskrit on his left forearm -- except it is misspelled, ‘Vihctoria’. Johnny Depp had ‘Winona Forever’ tattooed on his shoulder, only to famously change it to ‘Wino Forever’ after their subsequent divorce.
 
A recent Harris Poll showed that 16% of Britons and 17% of Americans regret their tattoos. No similar data is available here, but Úna from the Berkeley Clinic reckons that this clinic alone removes around 500 unwanted tattoos a year. Martin clarifies his reasons for belonging to that 16 or 17%. “If I’m wearing a t-shirt going into a nightclub, you definitely notice the bouncers giving you an extra look and I’m sure it’s the same with the girls once you’re in there. Even getting a job is tricky with this bloody thing.”
 
The noise from behind the door suddenly stops – it’s not until you notice the eerie silence that you realise how much the buzzing had wormed its way into your head. The industrial whirr came from the Palomar QYAG5 on the other side of the waiting room door. The Palomar looks like a photocopier with a vacuum nozzle attached, but with a cost of over €15,000, it is one of the top tattoo removal systems in the world today. Tattoo removal is evidently big business, with Palomar’s parent company trading on the NASDAQ stock market. Taking the silence as her cue, the receptionist leaves her desk and hovers over Martin.
 
“The laser tattoo removal system which works by heating up the tattoo ink under the skin until the ink starts to break down and dissipate,” she explains. I’m not sure if it’s biologically possible, but I begin to feel my own tattoo start to tingle. It’s a star with ‘If..’ written inside it, a pretentious Kipling reference wrapped in daftness, but either way, I feel it sizzle and squirm underneath my skin as she exalts the virtues of the futuristic sounding QYAG5.
 
The door opens and we both peer inside, the imposing tattoo remover sits Dalek-like in the corner of a sterile looking room, decorated in varying shades of white and chrome. A bed lies on one side of the room with the nozzle of the laser across it. Martin stands up, rolls up the sleeve of his t-shirt completely so it looks like a vest, and goes into the laser room.
 
The earliest tattoo dates back to ‘Otzi the Iceman’, a 5,300 year-old natural mummy found in 1991 in the Ötztal Alps between Austria and Italy. He was found with 57 tattoos on his lower spine, behind his left knee, and on his right ankle. If tattoos are not exactly new, then tattoo removal has quite the history too. The earliest description of the treatment dates back to ancient Greece - an inscription at the sanctuary of the famous medic Asclepius, tells of Pandarus, who had some tattoos removed from his forehead with the help of the gods. This method of laser treatment was developed in the 90s, but the Greek gods’ option would have been a hell of a lot cheaper.
 
Each laser treatment costs €95, but removals take at least six separate visits. The Berkeley Clinic in south county Dublin is just one of many tattoo removal clinics operating in Ireland today with eight clinics offering the treatment in the Dublin area alone.
 
Ten minutes later, Martin emerges, his sleeve still pulled up but his forearm is covered in a white cotton bandage, ironically enough, very similar to the one you get when you are tattooed. The receptionist assures us this was the standard time for a treatment, as any longer and the laser would cause the skin to burn irreparably.
 
I ask Martin did it hurt (the bumph in the literature compares the pain to a rubber band being snapped against the skin, a deliberately vague definition - how big is the band, how vicious is the person snapping the band?). “Ah it was all right, it was like a lighter held too close,” he said. As he left, I pondered the irony, a man with ‘Saoirse’ tattooed on his arm, looking at paying up to €1,000 to finally have freedom.

paulmcn8@gmail.com