Tara Gilliland was terrified. She wasn’t worried about her family or her life or anything that would strike others as particularly important. But considering her fear of needles, it’s easy to understand why Gilliland was so jittery: she was getting her first tattoo.

With her younger brother along for support, she quelled her fears. After half an hour of feeling like someone was scraping a metal fork across her left hip, Gilliland had her first tattoo: a four-leaf clover the size of a half-dollar coin.

Then she really freaked out.

“I thought, ‘What did I do? When I’m 80 years old I’m going to regret this,’” says the Huntsville, Ala., graduate student. “I didn’t know what to do.”

Although there are a lot worse things to have permanently inked on your body for the rest of your life — like a piece of Swiss cheese or an ex-boyfriend’s name — even the tamest tattoos can become undesirable over time. Long-sleeved clothes and make-up are only temporary solutions to a permanent problem. For students who really regret their ill-fated ink there is only one solution: surgical tattoo removal.

Laser removal

Anything procedure involving a laser in it may make long-sleeved clothes suddenly more appealing. But it shouldn’t. Laser removal is an effective and relatively painless way to remove tattoos, says Robert Dinsdale, a surgical doctor at Lawrence Otolaryngology Associates.

After anesthetic cream is applied and gauze placed over it, a small laser traces around the tattoo. Energy from the laser enters the ink pigment and breaks apart its structure. The body’s scavenger cells then clean out the ink as the skin heals, which takes about six weeks.

The entire process shouldn’t hurt anymore than getting the tattoo in the first place, Dinsdale says.

“It’s like a hard rubber band snap and then like a sunburn afterwards,” he says.

The length of each laser session and the number of times it has to be repeated depends on the tattoo’s size and number of colors. Red and yellow need one type of laser; blue, green and black require another.

And almost every kind of tattoo requires more than one session because the laser doesn’t lift ink out of the skin, but merely makes it fade, Dinsdale says.

“We can’t guarantee there is no ink,” he says. “But we can get to a point where the image isn’t discernable as an image anymore.”

Cut it out

If blasting a laser at your skin multiple times doesn’t sound appealing, excision is a quicker (although equally intimidating) way to remove small tattoos. It’s also the only way to guarantee that all the ink is gone.

Excision involves cutting out the tattooed area. For small tattoos, excision requires only one visit to the surgeon.

The trade-off is scarring. Whereas laser removal may make the tattoo area blister for a few weeks, excision leaves behind a permanent scar.

Still, many people prefer to explain a scar than an embarrassing tattoo, says Lee Bittenbender, a dermatologist who has removed several dozen tattoos during his career.

Dermabrasion

Dermabrasion basically sands off a tattoo. The skin is firmed with a freezing refrigerant spray. Then a spinning diamond-capped fray, like the tip of a small, cylinder-shaped sander, grazes the tattoo.

“It treats a tattoo like a stain on a piece of wood,” he says. “It’s like using sandpaper to remove the stain,” Bittenbender says.

During the process, the top layers of skin come off and so does some of the ink pigment. Like laser removal, dermabrasion relies on the body’s scavenger cells to help remove ink pigment during a six-week healing process. During that time, your skin looks and feels like a rug burn, Bittenbender says.

After six weeks, you can repeat the process until the tattoo fades and you can forget about the time you decided you couldn’t live without the supposed Japanese symbol for bravery inked across your shoulder.

Last Resort

Although tattoo removal is possible, doctors and tattoo artists alike agree that people who get tattoos should plan on having them forever.

Besides the added expense — $300 or more no matter how you do it — tattoo removal is akin to destroying a part of yourself, says Stacy Daugherty, owner and tattoo artist at Big Daddy Cadillac’s tattoo and piercing, 16 E. 8th St.

To Daugherty, tattoos are deeply personal, and although he understands that there are situations that warrant removal, he would never consider removing any of his own ink.

“It’s kind of like abortion to me,” Daugherty says.

People shouldn’t use tattoo removal as a scapegoat for getting tattoos they’re unsure about, he says.

Bittenbender agrees. Although most of his patients are in their 30s and 40s, Bittenbender advises students to avoid impulsive (and inebriated) decisions and to think long and hard about what they’re going to permanently print on their bodies.

“I ask most people to tell me about their tattoos and it’s amazing how many times their concluding remark is ‘and that was the stupidest thing I ever did,’” he says.

The final decision

For two days Gilliland thought maybe she had just made a stupid mistake. Her brother’s friend was in the process of removing a tattoo he didn’t like, and Gilliland wondered if maybe she should do the same.

“I thought, ‘Oh my gosh. I’m not going to be able to afford to get this removed.”

After two days, the freak-out ended and Gilliland came to terms with her tattoo. She realized she liked the clover. It represented her heritage and a bond to her brother, who got his first tattoo on the same day.

Now, Gilliland wouldn’t even consider removing her tattoo.

“Since those first two days I haven’t had any regrets,” she says. “I love it.”