In this crazy world, crazy things often occur, leading people to make mistakes and to regret their past actions. When tattoos happen to be one of such mistakes, there are few affordable and painless options that will wipe away the offending ink and leave its bearer with a clean slate. Some might say that’s just the way it goes: get a stupid tattoo and pay the price for your stupidity. Others, like Richard Simpson-Birks will hold a competition called Tatts Off 2010 so that those of us with terrible tattoos can potentially have them removed for free.
Simpson-Birks is the managing director of Tattoo Erase International AG (Tattoo Erase), a tattoo removal process that uses natural products. In a bid to get the word out about Tattoo Erase, a contest is being held with the grand prize of one male and one female entrant receiving a free Tattoo Erase procedure. Entrants are required to be residents of the United Kingdom and must provide a good story behind the offending tattoo that they want removed, as this will be the basis for the judges final decision.
The Tattoo Erase procedure is an interesting one, which doesn’t use lasers, but does rely on needles. According to Richard Simpson-Birks:
“All treatments are carried out in our clinical treatment rooms by fully trained and experienced therapists. The skin is treated by making a series of dots using a needle similar to the way the tattoo was applied. Instead of putting ink into the skin, we use Kataderm®, a mixture of natural products that persuade the body to expel the pigment through natural processes. Small scabs form on the treated area that fall off over a period of two weeks taking the ink with them.
Because the body is sensitive and naturally regenerative, we need to give the treated areas their own time to recover to normal before working on an adjacent area. This is a minimum of 8 weeks. The process is repeated until the entire tattoo has been treated and removed. On average a tattoo takes between six and eight treatments but this will vary according to size and complexity.
This removal method is of significant benefit compared to laser treatment, which breaks down the tattoo ink pigment by the application of intense heat. In these cases the burnt pigment is absorbed by the body, putting consequential trauma and strain on the body’s excretory systems.”
All I can say is that I hope someone is recording all the bad tattoo stories and saving them for a book, because that would be well worth reading. “Yeah, so I was with my buddy Chris and my buddy Chris says, he says, I bet you wouldn’t get like, a massive dick tattooed on your back. And I was like, hell yeah, I’ll do that. And then I went and did it and when my wife saw it, she divorced me and man, now I hate having a big dick tattooed on my back.”
Good luck to all the entrants!