I don’t like tattoos myself (you know this if you’ve read SLN for any length of time) but accept it is the right of people to do as they wish with their own bodies.

Today’s Daily Mail (UK) newspaper is reporting that Victoria Beckham seems to be having laser treatment to remove tattoos she has on her wrists, because they are affecting her image as a business woman.

The fashion wheel is always turning. It makes me wonder if a style icon such as Victoria Beckham has decided they’re no longer suitable, how long it might be before many, many others follow suit? After all, it’s often celebrities who lead in the fashion stakes, and people will take their cue from them as to what’s ‘in’ and what’s ‘out’. If Posh Spice has decided that they’re ‘out’ (even though she may, at 41 years of age, be slightly irrelevant to teenagers taking their cue from younger singers and actresses) might it be that others will follow suit? How long until something like this -tattoo removal- becomes a full blown fashion trend?

A little research shows that some celebrities are already having them removed, usually because their inked-on devotion to a partner lasted longer than the partnership itself. Rapper 50-Cent, recasting himself in movies, appears to have had tattoos removed because he was fed up with the length of time it took make-up artists to hide them in films, and because he felt (probably correctly) that their presence saw him being typecast for certain movie roles. Singer Pharrell decided that tattoos were ‘dumb’ when his son was born, and had his tatts removed.

There will be those who will never lose their ink. Those who determine that each one is a reminder of the steps they’ve taken in the journey of life.

And there are those who were young and foolish enough to get them done ‘because everyone else was doing it’.

Despite what disciples of tattoos say, attitudes change. When I was 20, everyone I knew -including me- smoked because it was the cool thing to do. Thankfully, I didn’t do it for long, and quit a couple of years after starting. Now, many of the teenagers and people in their early 20s I know have never smoked. Because smoking isn’t cool. Tattoos are on a similar level, I think, and many will regret their ink in years to come. Many people will never get ink, in the future, because it isn’t ‘cool’.

Victoria Beckham’s wrist shows evidence of a faded tattoo

How people wish to proceed with the maintenance or removal of tattoos is a matter for them. I hope that, if removal becomes the next trend, that the taxes I pay to fund the UK’s ‘free at source’ National Health Service does not start spending part of its budget on tattoo removal. If people were grown up enough to get inked from their own pockets, they should be grown up enough to pay for removal from their own pockets.

Ella