Women Race to Get Tattoos Erased

July 22, 2008— -- Perhaps it was because she had always wanted to do it. Or it could have been the fact that her college friends were road tripping from her university in Boston to Rhode Island to have it done.

Whatever the reason, Jana Steele says that the flowers she got tattooed on her lower back when she was 18 years old are a lingering reminder of her freshman year.

"It was something that I always talked about doing and wanted, but I probably would not have gone through with it without a big group of people," she says.

Now a 26-year-old professional living in Los Angeles, Steele says she hasn't yet thought seriously about having the tattoo removed.

"I like it; I can see it when I want to see it, but everyone else can't see it," she says. "It doesn't affect me at the workplace.

"The only thing would be one day when I'm really old, and whether I would want a wrinkly, probably faded tattoo on my body. I might remove it then."

But unlike Steele, many among the millions of women ages 18-30 who have tattoos -- estimated to be about one in four women, all told -- would like to get rid of their ink, a new study published in the journal Archives of Dermatology suggests.

Lead study author Myrna Armstrong, professor at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, and her team surveyed 196 people who sought tattoo removal -- 66 men and 130 women -- at four separate tattoo removal clinics.

What the researchers found through this survey was that those who sought tattoo removal were more likely to be women who were white and single with some degree of college education and between the ages of 24 and 39. Armstrong says the reason behind the larger proportion of those seeking tattoo removal falling into this group may be that young women experience more "societal fallout" from their body art than others.

"What we usually tend to find is that some event, usually a negative event, triggers [tattoo removal]," she says. "It's negative comments -- from work, from home and from school as well."