Tue, Mar. 01, 2005

Nothing lasts forever, not even tattoos

By Nicholas Spangler

TOOL OF THE TRADE: Scott Marable demonstrates a low-powered laser beam in the office of Dr. TATTOFF in Miami Beach. Morel specializes in tattoo removal. JOHN VANBEEKUM/HERALD STAFF

TURNING BACK: Nurse Ellen Jewell uses a laser to remove a tattoo from Sergio Rivera's hand at the Dr. TATTOFF office in Miami Beach's Mount Sinai Medical Center. JOHN VANBEEKUM/HERALD STAFF

Jimmy took a seat in front of the huge electric waterfall in Dr. TATTOFF's waiting room. It was a swell place, full of art books that seemed to have come from the library and a flat-screen television and this truly enormous electric waterfall operating noiselessly in the middle of the room.

Jimmy is 58 and works in the aviation industry. He used to come here -- Dr. TATTOFF's offices are in the Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach -- to see his cardiologist. But that was years ago, and he's better now.

This time he was back to see about a big, smeared dragon tattoo on his right shoulder.

Dr. TATTOFF takes tattoos off.

"What a place!" was the first thing Jimmy said. "It looks like I'm in Beverly Hills." He'd heard about this place on the radio, and in newspaper advertisements, and done some research on the Web. This tattoo had been on his mind for a while.

He talked about a cruise he took some years ago with his wife and daughter, when somebody took a picture of them lying out in some deck chairs. "Just looking at this picture," he said, "everybody in their bathing suits, everybody happy, and this huge monstrous thing on my arm. I'm not that person any more. Well, I am the person. Just not that."

Then Jimmy told the story of his tattoo.

"I was 18," Jimmy said. 'We just finished two months of combat training. This was '65, the first big push in Vietnam. For two months we had these drill sergeants telling us `Those guys in black pajamas are going to get you. You guys are going to die.' They just lock you up for two months with that, with nothing but that. So we finish this training -- I'm in the best shape of my life -- we all get drunk, we all go out and get this tattoo. 'We're combat men now!' That was Fort Jacksonville, S.C.

'You know, we lost contact over the years. We swore we'd keep in touch. `Worrying Davis' -- he worried about everything. 'Mickey' -- this kid with these ears that stuck out. 'Boston' -- he was from Boston. And this guy with a head like a watermelon -- we called him 'Bighead.' We were going to get together in California when we all got back.

"It was two years, active duty. We never did, though. I don't know why. I wonder about that, sometimes."

Back in those days, Jimmy said, a tattoo was taboo. 'It was something for the motorcycle dudes, who'd put it right in your face. And you gotta remember -- I went to Catholic school, 12 years. That was the Bronx. It was probably the best education around but I hated every minute of it. So I guess it was a rebellion in a way, against all that -- `Yeah, I'll do what I want now.' "

Other customers were coming in now and others leaving. They all looked 30 years younger than Jimmy. There was a graphic artist with a pair of dots on his hand -- 10 years old and access to India ink; an optometrist with a woman's name in Chinese characters over his forearm -- bad choice in women; a stunning woman who works in real estate but said she was really a sculptor, afflicted with an indistinct butterfly on her back -- bad choice in metaphor. "I liked the idea of an animal that changes forms," said the sculptor. "It blooms. It was me, at one point. But it's not me anymore."

An existential pall descended, briefly, upon the offices of Dr. TATTOFF. Fortunately, it was not long before Jimmy's name was called. He walked through a big cream-colored door to a long hallway full of examination rooms.

Dr. TATTOFF did not happen to be in. Dr. TATTOFF did not happen to exist, actually. But there was a Dr. Woolf, who examined Jimmy's arm and whispered, once he'd left Jimmy's examination room: "Thirty square inches. That's huge. It's just huge. That's, like, $10,000."

There was also James Morel, a 34-year-old entrepreneur with a background in reality TV, the founder and CEO of Dr. TATTOFF, Inc. He wore fashionably baggy scrubs and skateboarding shoes and complained about the abject lameness of the Enya album piping through the speakers.

His partner in this enterprise is Christopher Knight, who played Peter, the middle son on The Brady Bunch. Knight made a fortune during the Internet boom and was unable to be at the clinic this day because of a previous commitment to attend a lingerie show in Las Vegas.

None of this, somehow, seemed surprising or even strange as Morel explained it. Then he cut Jimmy a deal for $5,700.

"I gotta talk this over with my wife," Jimmy said. "She thinks it's all silly. If you accept yourself, and know who you are, what's the difference? But I am going to be back. I'm definitely going to be back."