After a decade, adult-film star Alexis Amore is looking to remove the Playboy bunny tattoo below her belly button. She also wants to get rid of a crown and the letter "a" on her wrists.
"I got them when I was really young," said the petite 30-year-old. "I'm a little bit older and a little bit wiser now. And it's not very classy to have tattoos on your wrists and stomach."
Amore, who goes by her stage name, is in the months-long process of getting rid of her ink at the Dr. Tattoff tattoo removal clinic in Beverly Hills.
The actress is just one of the dozens of people who walk through Dr. Tattoff's doors each day.
As more and more people offer up their arms, chests and ankles for tattoos of all kinds, the market for getting rid of them is growing. And Dr. Tattoff Inc. is hoping to cash in on those regrets.
The company, which also has tattoo-removal clinics in Encino and Irvine, uses lasers to burn away the ink. Its three locations get about 25 customers a day each, said John Keefe, Dr. Tattoff's chief executive. By year-end the firm hopes to have an additional five locations outside California, and it wants to start issuing publicly traded stock next year.
"Tattoos are becoming more common in the workplace and in society," Keefe said. "My suspicion is that along with that, the tattoo regret factor will only grow as people get older."
Keefe declined to release the firm's revenue total but did say Tattoff is a multimillion-dollar business. He estimated that tattoo removal could become a $10-billion-a-year industry. And this is catching the eye of investors and firms that would like to help Dr. Tattoff expand.
Tattoos are big business, and it costs more to remove a tattoo than to get one.
Most tattoos run about $100, depending on the size of the piece, the colors used and the skill of the tattooer. It usually costs about $750 to $1,500 to remove one, Keefe said, because it requires five to 10 treatments at about $150 a pop.
But whereas a dozen or so tattoo parlors can be found in most big cities, tattoo removal clinics are much harder to find -- which means huge potential for Dr. Tattoff, said Steve Kann, managing director at Bridgewater Capital Corp., an Irvine investment bank.
Kann does no business with Dr. Tattoff but has taken a look at its business plan. "The numbers they're generating on their three locations are really impressive numbers, top line and bottom line," he said. "I think you could have one or two or three locations in every major metropolitan area in the country and you're going to do substantial business with every location."
