Tattoo Removal?

[DougC]

- - - I was giving a co-worker trouble about his tattoos and at one point I said "do you know what it would cost to get rid of all those?" I mentioned the two medical ways I remembered to get rid of tattoos (laser & cutting open the flap of skin and scraping off the back side; there's a couple others I couldn't recall at the moment or now) and he went into all these ways that you could supposedly get rid of tattoos:
- One was sand it with sandpaper every day. For many years. Which I'm not gonna doubt would work eventually, but it's gonna take a few decades.
- Another he claimed was to rub it with buttermilk every day for six years. Huh?
- There were three others, which he said that tattoo artists knew about. They were all "methods" that sounded like "hop on one foot at midnight while rubbing your nose with a pickle" - all of them sounded like the buttermilk method- absolute bullshit. I did note that all of them were cheap to do, which seems like what a tattoo artist would want you to think: that it doesn't cost much to get rid of a tattoo, it just takes a looong time. Presumably after you've spent six years rubbing your arm with buttermilk, you're not gonna remember who told you to do it in the first place. - What are the actual "medical, surgical" ways available to remove a tattoo, as opposed to crock ideas tattoo artists "know" of? - MC

[C K Dexter Haven]

Amputation.

[evilbeth]

Actually, there is a teeny-tiny bit of truth to the buttermilk method.

Putting buttermilk on the skin is a long-standing folk remedy for fading any kind of skin blemish. It does not work quickly but it does tend to diminish the appearance of skin discoloration. (It somewhat depends on how deep the discoloration goes so tattoos are probably not going to be greatly affected by this treatment.) The buttermilk method has long been used to fade facial freckles caused by sun exposure and to fade age spots on hands. I assume it's the acid in the buttermilk that does the fading of the skin.

[Cap'n Capri]

I was told opening the skin with a razor blade and dousing the tatty with peroxide would work. Wrong.

[psycat90]

Hmph. I thought this was a thread about getting rid of short guys that constantly yell 'da plane!' Oh well.

[Cisco]

My Grandma had a tatoo removed from her forearm back in the 50's (or maybe the 60's?) and she said they gave her a shot of something that made her arm swell up and proceeded to grind the offending tatoo off with a circular sandpaper machine. The skin in the area is still slightly discolored but by no means is it scarred. It looks better than most laser removals ive seen, albeit more painful.