The stars all seemed to be in alignment.

She was 16, a junior in high school. It was Christmas break in Springfield, Mo. She'd just awoken with a concussion after being involved in a sledding incident with a tree at 2 a.m. the night before. A friend was an amateur tattoo artist and needed gas money to get to Kansas City, pronto. And she had $5 in her pocket.

What better time or place, then, to get a lemon-size tattoo of a fish put across her chest?

"It sounds so cliche, but you just don't know at 16, almost 17 . . . You're not thinking about your future. You're not thinking that when you're 30 you won't want a fish on your breast," said Wendi Walker.

She can laugh about it now - nearly 20 years later and after spending $1,600 to get it professionally removed. That's 320 times more than she paid to put it on, but she doesn't care.

"I would have paid $20,000 to have it taken off," she says firmly.

Walker's not alone. Tattoos are more popular than ever, with each new generation seeming to embrace them more than the last. So it stands to reason that tattoo regret - realizing you have to live with an impulse decision - is on the rise as well.

Once the exclusive realm of plastic surgeons, laser tattoo removal is becoming more commonplace in non-medical settings. Shelley Novello has run Ink Be Gone locations in Denver and Westminster for the past three years. More recently, Gary Betz opened Tattoo Must Go locations in Englewood and Loveland, with a company motto of "What was I thinking?"

Statistics are hard to come by, but a 2003 Harris Poll shows that 17 percent of tattooed people don't like what they have. A 2005 survey by the American Society of Dermatological Surgery suggests that only 6 percent of those with tattoos they don't like do something about it.

"I think the statistic is higher," Novello said. "I think 50 percent are unhappy with at least one of their tattoos. Two years ago, I think, 5 percent looked at doing something about it. Now you're looking at 20 percent."

Part of the reason, she said, is clinics like hers. "There was no place for the normal guy to go that wasn't a Cherry Creek-type of person to get tattoos removed," she said. "Now it's an option that doesn't cause scarring, and it's more affordable."

"What inspires it is some sort of life-changing event," Betz said. "I've got three clients right now working to get their tattoos off because they're getting married."

People entering the military aren't allowed to have any visible tattoos.

"I take off a lot of ex-lovers' or ex-husbands' and ex-wives' names," Betz said. "I take a ton of marijuana leaves off the hand."

Men tend to have pragmatic reasons for getting a tattoo removed, Novello and Betz said, while women lean toward the cosmetic.

Once college students enter the job market, "they get a dose of reality," Betz said. "Tattoos can kill an interview."

Or a relationship.

"Somebody had tattooed tribal eyebrows across his forehead," Novello said, which was a drawback now that he was in a custody fight for his daughter. Others had misspelled words. One man called as he was walking out of divorce court, looking to get his tattooed wedding ring removed. One woman had the names of three men on her neck.

"And the guy who brought her in - he was none of these three people," Novello said.

Betz's clients have been as diverse as a father who didn't want to explain to his young son how a unicorn got on his hip and a 64-year-old woman who got a butterfly with friends on a vacation whim. He's in the process of removing a tattoo from his daughter, Erica, a college student who got "Lebe das leben" - German for "Live life" - on her rib cage with college friends a few years ago.

"We took a trip and got tattoos," she said with a shrug.

Often, the reason a work is removed isn't that the person has suddenly become anti-tattoo. Rather, he's gotten more tattoos over the years and realized that his starter tats are amateurish in comparison, so the purpose is to "free up the real estate" for a newer, better design. Or at least in a better location.

"I love tattoos. Women who have the half-sleeves - I think that's so sexy. It can be really feminine. For me the real estate, the place where it was put and what was there - I'd grown tired of it," said Walker, who has other less-prominent tattoos that she loves.

After the impulse inking, "I proceeded to hide it from my mother for six months," she said. "From 16 to 25, every shirt I wore showed it. After that, every shirt I wore covered it up. I got to the point where I hated it."

Walker chose to skip the laser clinics and go to a medical doctor specializing in laser removal at Expert Laser Clinic because she wanted a local anesthetic, given the sensitive location of her tattoo. This was after she was the maid of honor in a friend's wedding "and four of the seven bridesmaids had tattoos that needed to be covered up," she said.

She also began thinking of her own wedding someday.

"All I knew is, I didn't want to walk down the aisle with my father and have a big fish showing through my wedding dress," she said. "The dress didn't come, but the fish is gone. That's all I care about."

"A lot of people who come in are young professionals in their early 30, late 20s and they got the tattoos in college. That's not who they are anymore," Novello said.

"We get a lot of cartoon characters. . . . We have people come in who were unhappy with a tattoo they had and had it covered with something else. Now they have a big black blob they're very unhappy with."

That was exactly the case with Cheri Deherrera, of Denver, whose five tattoos (some of them homemade) seemed like a great idea as a teen but not so hot as an executive secretary in her 40s.

"Most are gotten when you're a teenager or going through a midlife crisis," Deherrera said.

As for her own, "they were just something to do," she said. "They didn't mean anything to me."

A chain of roses "turned into a blob of ink on my ankle," she said. "I'm an assistant to executives. I had a butterfly on one of my hands. Sometimes I'll be taking notes in meetings . . . and it just doesn't look great."

She's told her children that they may get piercings but warned them away from tattoos.

"I don't care what you get pierced. That you can take out," she said. "I've made them go with me to watch the process of getting the tattoos removed."

Most laser treatments include a cooling unit that blows cold air onto the skin to numb it to the laser. The laser is then set to specific wavelengths depending on the color of the ink. The process crystallizes the ink under the skin, and in coming weeks the burned area - much like a bad sunburn - sheds the skin naturally. Each ensuing treatment takes away a little more ink. Older tattoos naturally fade and take fewer treatments.

It's counterintuitive, but the bigger, darker tattoos come off more easily than the lighter, more colorful ones.

"The ones we have a very hard time with are the pastel colors," said Novello.

"The homemade tattoos, the prison tattoos - I get those off in a couple of treatments," Betz said. "They're almost always India ink."

Most clients report that it's more painful (and expensive) to get the artwork removed than to put it on. Most clients compare the pain to getting snapped with a rubber band or splattered by bacon grease. It all depends on location, however.

"It hurt about 20 times worse to take it off than having it put on," Walker said. "Mostly I smelled it. It's just burning your flesh."

"It might hurt a little bit more doing it, but we just got one word done in a minute," Erica Betz said as the laser was working. "It took about 45 minutes to get it put on."

Brownm@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2674

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