Hall of fame football players have them, so do pop stars. Why can't you flaunt tattoos on your body? Just go ahead, pierce and ink your skin to your dream designs and there's a tattoo for you! Chill out, dude or dudette!

No problem, eh?

Sorry folks, but there is a problem - and you ought to be aware about this. The problem is very easy to state and here it goes: making tattoos is easy but removing them isn't.

First, let's understand why it's hard to remove a tattoo. Creating a tattoo involves piercing the epidermis with a needle and spreading indelible ink under the skin. It's permanent - "here today, here tomorrow" - and therefore hard to remove - not "here today, gone tomorrow"!

Skin grafting is the oldest and most fool-proof method of tattoo removal. It involves surgical excision, usually under anesthesia, of clear skin from one part of your body and transplanting it on to the wound medically created by slicing away the tattooed skin. Pretty grisly, you say? Apart from being expensive, the surgery leaves two scars: one where the "donor" skin belonged and two, where it's transplanted.

The tattoo, though, is gone for ever.

Another old but macabre method is to scrape the skin till the tattoo is rubbed or sanded out of sight. This technique is called Dermabrasion. This method too is likely to leave a scar depending on the depth to which dermabrasion is required. A substitute for sanding is to cause a carefully monitored chemical burn using acids like glycolic acid or trichloro acetic acid (TCA). The method is likely to be effective but at the cost of severe scarring.

In tattoo removal, the modern age began with the introduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) laser technology. It works by burning off a superficial sliver of epidermis with each pass. This sliver of skin is wiped off with soft cloth taking tattoo pigment fragments along with it. While a single session might well remove a tattoo the bad old scar is its negative feature. As a result CO2 lasers are by and large no longer in use.

The hot thing today - literally - is Q-switched lasers. It works on the high tech theory of photothermolysis where the tattoo is shot with short, high-energy bursts of laser light. The latter heats the skin, expands it, and breaks the tattoo ink into tiny particles that are absorbed by the body's immune system and lymphatic flow. The colors fade away and with multiple applications they disappear. Not the colour yellow, though - and not deep ink either. Besides, Q-switched lasers can lead to hyper- or hypo-pigmentation. It's plus point, though, is that it usually removes tattoos entirely without leaving any scars.

So if you're sold on tattoos, always remember the bottom-line: they're quite easy to create but darned difficult to remove!

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