It’s almost summer. More skin will be visible, on and off the beach. And more tattoos. Will they be an inspiration? Or a warning?
Stuart Yellen wanted to be rid of his tattoo almost as soon as he got it, and a week later the ink began to drip down his arm. Eleven years later, there’s still something that looks like a bruise or a birthmark ringing his left arm.
“People should really think before they get tattoos; they don’t,” Yellen, 55, of Woodland Hills, Calif., said after one of the monthly treatments he gets at UCLA.
An estimated 45 million Americans have a tattoo, and, says Dr. David Green, a dermatologist in Bethesda, Md., “the remorse rate with tattoos is very high. Some people sober up the next morning, some sober up 40 years later.”