Not as permanent as advertised! Mark Wahlberg, Megan Fox and Pete Davidson are a few of the celebrities who’ve chosen to remove their tattoos over the years — and detailed the painful process.
“I don’t want my kids getting tattoos,” Wahlberg revealed during a January 2012 interview on the Today show, explaining that he slowly removed all “six or seven” of his designs. “And I wanted them to be [removed] by the time I did The Fighter because putting make-up on and covering them up has always been a pain in the butt.”
The Oscar nominee, who famously had a Bob Marley tattoo on his shoulder, noted that he even took his two older children, Ella and Michael, to the doctors to see how “painful it is and what I have to go through” to get them off. (In addition to his two eldest children, the Father Stu star also shares Brendan and Grace with wife Rhea Durham.)
That same year, Fox opened up about her choice to make her iconic Marilyn Monroe design, located on her forearm, disappear. (She started the process in 2011.)
“Getting them is not that bad,” the Transformers actress told Jay Leno on The Tonight Show in February 2012.
The removal, however, she described as feeling like “your skin sort of explodes and looks like little kernels of popcorn popping up. They can’t numb it enough to make the pain go away.”
The Johnny & Clyde star noted that as a teenager she didn’t believe that she would ever outgrow her tattoos. “I was stubborn and I thought that I would love it forever, or that it would be like a book of my life, all the things that I loved when I was younger,” Fox told the late night host. “And it’s not that at all.”
Davidson, meanwhile, explained in May 2021 that his switch from full-time comedian to acting led to his decision to laser away his tattoos.
“I honestly never thought that I would get the opportunity to act and I love it a lot,” the Saturday Night Live alum said during an appearance on Late Night With Seth Meyers. “You have to get there three hours earlier to cover all your tattoos, because for some reason, people in movies, they don’t have that much.”
Davidson had more than 100 designs all over his body when he began “burning them off,” which he confessed is “worse them getting them.”
In January 2023, the Dirt actor appeared to have successfully removed the tattoos dedicated to ex Kim Kardashian. In photos from his trip to Hawaii, Davidson’s chest ink that read “my girl is a lawyer” was seemingly gone as were the words “Aladdin” and “Jasmine,” which referred to his and Kardashian’s SNL skit that sparked their romance. (Us Weekly confirmed in August 2022 that the pair called it quits after getting together in October 2021.)
Scroll down to see which stars have undergone tattoo removal surgery:
