Though you can’t see it, the invisible beam of laser light hitting Jodi Taylor’s skin a couple of times a second is audible enough: a sharp, sparkplug ZAP! that sounds like the repeat of a miniature Buck Rogers disintegrator pistol. The result is almost as striking. As the laser moves over her tattoo — a wild horse, galloping across her ankle — every ZAP! makes the skin rise in a tiny white dot.

Like many people who come in for laser removal, Taylor has simply outgrown her tattoo — something that once spoke to her strongly enough that she had it printed on her skin. Now a young mother from Malvern, more interested in wearing skirts to school functions than youthful expression, she’s ready to be rid of her permanent pony.

The man behind the laser is Dr. Jay Kincannon, a dermatologist at UAMS. One of Arkansas’s foremost experts on making tattoos disappear, Kincannon has been doing laser removals for 12 years.

Though older tattoo-removal options like excision (cutting it out) and dermabrasion (sanding it off) are still around, for larger tattoos or tattoos in delicate areas, laser removal is the best option. Kincannon said the lasers he uses can be tuned to interact only with certain colors in a tattoo (for black inks, like the outline of Taylor’s horse, the light is invisible to the naked eye).

Though the patient is generally numbed up before the procedure begins, Taylor and others said that the individual pulses of light are no more painful than someone popping the skin lightly with a rubber band. Unless the treatment is particularly heavy, scarring is usually minimal, though sometimes there might be some pinpoint bleeding from the area after the treatment. With large tattoos, there can be thinning of the skin. If a patch of skin has been repeatedly tattooed, it is sometimes impossible to get all the ink out.

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