After rehab and some soul-searching, the Saturday Night Live comedian Pete Davidson is having hundreds of tattoos removed because they remind him of “a sad person that was very unsure”.
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with tattoos,” Davidson told Variety. “But they should have meaning. Not just that I was high watching Game of Thrones.”
His tattoos were certainly pretty off-putting. He has one of SpongeBob SquarePants smoking a joint, a horrible alien face from the 1996 film Mars Attacks!, the Snapchat ghost in a birdcage, the word “Shaolin” in gigantic letters across his belly button, and many others.
I also had a tattoo, aged 19, when I was also a bit sad — not as sad as Davidson — and geographically lost in Mexico. Or, hang on, was I in Guatemala? I mean, I did say I was lost. No Google Maps then.
It had been raining for days, because it was the rainy season. Streets turned to rivers and churned with brown water. There was nothing to do but play cards because, as well as no Google Maps, there were no smartphones.
The two cheerful girls from Nottingham I had taken up with decided to go and get fresh tattoos. This was 1999, when not everyone was covered head to toe in ink. Having a tattoo was quite unusual, especially if you had been to private school. I believed myself to be an unusual person and so went along. We held our trekking sandals in our hands and waded across the street to the tat shop.
I had a single, timid star tattooed on my hip while my new friends got flamboyant lizards and flowers. Even allowing for the fact that I am famously a physical coward, it was the single most painful thing that had happened to me so far in my life. I was sweating with the effort of not smacking the needle out of the hand of the tattoo “artist”.
I paid no attention to tattoo aftercare because I was 19, sloppy and self-destructive. I went in the sun and went swimming and it sort of splurged out at the sides into an ugly blue blob. So the next year, in Sydney, I had tattoos of more stars over the top.
The process hadn’t got any less painful. There was more sweating and biting of fingers so as not to bop the tattooist smartly on the nose. These stars didn’t really hold their shape either, though I don’t think it was my fault this time. The whole thing was kind of a mess.
Fast forward to 2007 and I am 27 years old. In the intervening years the tattoo industry had really taken off and I met a girl who had a tattoo of a 19th-century-style waxed moustache on the side of her forefinger, which she held across her upper lip as a visual gag. I stared, appalled.
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Tattoos were no longer a rare and interesting thing, private school or no private school. They were now everywhere and I no longer wanted to be part of this weird blue cult. Plus, my tattoo was stupid and ugly and reminded me of how sloppy and self-destructive I can be.
So when I was contacted about a new way of removing tattoos, I went along for a freebie and wrote about it for the newspaper I was working for at the time.
First, you can burn it off with a laser — this sounds like what Pete Davidson (who counts the British actresses Phoebe Dynevor and Kate Beckinsale among his exes) is doing and it’s the way most people do it. He says, “It’s like putting your arm on a grill and burning off a layer, and then you gotta do maintenance and let it heal properly. And it’s pretty tough. It sucks, I’m not gonna lie.”
The new method worked by retattooing the design with a liquid that clung to the tattoo ink and then sucked it to the surface of the skin, where it formed a blue scab, which then went the way of all scabs.
Both methods, just to be clear, are extremely painful. Mine was so painful that I only got tiny bits of mine off because, in the end, it wasn’t worth the time and pain for something so small and hidden away. My tattoo is minuscule compared with Davidson’s acreage of decoration, and my assessment is that he must be tough as hell to put up with it.
“It’s a six-week healing process each time you get one removed,” he says. “So each tattoo is 10 to 12 sessions. That’s 60 weeks of your life right there on just one tattoo.” It has also cost him $200,000 so far. Mine was free. Should have been a journalist, Pete!
If you have been paying attention, you will now believe that I, aged 44, still have a collection of blurry stars on my hip with bits missing out of them. And you would be right. It’s not very chic but at least, I suppose, it’s not a yellow cartoon sponge smoking a doobie.
