Tattoos are supposed to be permanent and personal. But what happens when you outgrow them? | Canada Voices

There’s no magic eraser for life’s messy canvas, as 22-year-old Charlotte Ahern could tell you firsthand if she wasn’t holding her breath through the pain.

Once a month, Ms. Ahern sits in a dentist-type chair, dons protective glasses and cranks the volume on her noise-cancelling headphones, usually to Pink Floyd’s The Great Gig In the Sky.

She squeezes a stress ball as if she’s strangling a poisonous snake to endure what feels like hot, rapid-fire rubber-band snaps on her skin, while a technician traces a laser along the ink on her arms and chest for 45 long minutes.

The Zimmer – named for the company that makes it – follows with a blast of cryogenic cooling air to ease the burn of the laser, which makes a clicking sound like the Predator movie monster. For Ms. Ahern, the female voice wailing in Great Gig is both noise cancelling and emotional-support therapy.

Every month for the last two years – and with another year to go – Ms. Ahern visits the Removery Clinic in Ottawa’s Glebe neighbourhood to erase her 23 tattoos.

On an April afternoon, session 12 of about 24, specialist Christina Eustace aims the laser at Ms. Ahern’s right arm, targeting a cluster of images just above a Hello Kitty Band-Aid inked across the top of her hand, whose much-awaited demise will be left to another appointment.

“I hate you, Hello Kitty,” Ms. Ahern says, between teethy clicks. “I will dance on your grave when you’re gone.”

Ms. Ahern doesn’t regret a single painful removal appointment: she craves a blank slate.

Not because she hates tattoos. “They’re a beautiful form of self-expression,” she says.

But because one day “the fog lifted, and suddenly I didn’t recognize myself in the mirror.”

Tattoos have been a way to establish status, mark milestones, declare love or process loss since the earliest civilizations. Humans have also been rethinking their skin art for just as long: Even Egyptian mummies have been found with tattoos scraped away.

Today, tattoos have gained in popularity among younger generations. About a third of Canadians have at least one, and according to some surveys as many as half experience some regrets.

The reasons for second thoughts vary, says Ms. Eustace: the tattoo has lost meaning, a new career frowns upon them, a relationship ends. She’s taken the laser to sensitive areas such as fingers, the bottom of feet and her own wrist – an experience which she rated a seven out of 10 on the pain scale.

Luckily, for most clients at Removery clinics, appointments last about five minutes. Ms. Ahern, whose ink covers both arms and her chest, is an outlier case.

Ms. Ahern received her first tattoo on her 17th birthday, a present from her parents who finally gave into her wish for one. She carefully chose two faces – one weeping, one smiling – with a flower whose petals with represented the friends who had helped her through a difficult time.

A year later, no longer needing parental permission, she had the word “temporary” added to her right arm. She liked that she could pick its meaning to match her audience – it was either a joke about making the temporary permanent, or a reminder that sadness was only temporary.

And then, month by month, sometimes copying a friend, sometimes on her own, she filled her arms and chest. Side-by-side dragons flicked their tails on her collarbone. A sword appeared between them, its blade running down her chest. The cursed Hello Kitty Band-Aid created its own injury across her hand. A snake wound around her left forearm, a crowned ghost in the hollow of its tail. Nearby, a stately heron represented her family name. Above her left hand, the ink from two butterflies eventually bled into one.

Some of the tattoos are random choices that belong to another, much sadder Charlotte, who shaved her head and smoked too much pot and felt safer with a chainmail of ink fused in her skin: a lighter, a knife, a bee, her “devil-made-me-do-it” lady, a stegosaurus.

Others are clear signposts of her mental health journey through a difficult childhood. The chemical structure of serotonin (a chemical linked to positive mood) plays as aspirational. The medicine bottle was sarcasm. “I’ve been medicated for most of my life,” says Ms. Ahern, who is still healing from a traumatic event when she was young. “As if I needed a reminder to take my pills.”

At first she thought she might keep a few of the meaningful tattoos – her cat, Azriel, perhaps, her dog, Rocky – but now they’re all going, click by searing click.

Altogether, the tattoos represent protection Ms. Ahern no longer needs to move forward, the too-public scars she no longer wants to carry from a time when depression and anxiety blurred her days.

For a while, Ms. Ahern tried to conceal the ink under long sleeves and layers of foundation. When she learned she could get them removed, she emptied her savings and paid $7,981 upfront. (The average Removery client spends about a third of that price.) She will receive treatments until she’s satisfied with the results.

So, no magic eraser, unfortunately. But if healing didn’t take effort, she wonders, would it have the same meaning?

Ms. Ahern is still working on her mental health and not every day is easy. But as the ink fades, a new Charlotte is emerging in the mirror. A Charlotte more free in her own skin.

“I want people to know that it’s possible to change if you feel stuck,” Ms. Ahern says. “I haven’t found true happiness yet. But I think I’ve found enough to keep me looking for the real thing.”