You are not alone. An estimated 20 million Americans sport tattoos. It used to be that if someone wanted to remove a skin tattoo, a surgeon excised it with a scalpel, usually in increments to help the tissue around it expand and cover the wound. Today, we can use laser removal. Laser technology has made great strides in eliminating tattoos. The laser's short pulses of intense light pass harmlessly through the top layers of the skin and are absorbed by the tattoo pigment. This causes the tattoo pigment to fragment into smaller particles that are then removed by the body's immune system. With the array of state-of-the-art lasers, these all help to remove tattoos of all colors, shapes, and sizes, but it will take several treatments. But the method is far superior to that used in the old days, when we had to remove it surgically.