What Were You Inking?!?

Not everyone still loves their tattoos 20 years (or even 20 minutes) later

- Lenore Skenazy

HALFWAY THROUGH GETTING her palms tattooed, Long Island mom Angela Sarro realized: This was a big mistake. She was getting the red and blue pills as seen in the movie The Matrix, one on each palm—the red representing a yearning for truth, even if it's disturbing, and the blue guaranteeing blissful ignorance.

“I looked down and started crying,” says Sarro. The red one looked like a jelly bean. She asked the artist to stop. “And he said, ‘Nope. You already paid. You’re getting the blue one too.’” Blissfully ignorant, but soon to learn the disturbing truth, she went along with it.

A few weeks later when her son started fourth grade and his new teacher waved at her, “I was too mortified to wave back,” says Sarro. She didn’t want anyone seeing the blobs on her hands. “They weren’t even the same shape!”

As the weeks went on, “I would clutch my hands into fists so much that my fingers would ache and I would have to unwrap them at the end of the day,” she says. But the self-doubt went even deeper than the ink. “Was I a bad mom? What kind of person am I? It really makes you wonder a lot of things about yourself, like: Why did I get this impulsive thing in the first place? What does it tell everyone around me about my judgment?”

Desperately Googling to see if she could undo what she’d done, Sarro found a national chain of tattoo removal parlors called Removery. They not only had a branch in Manhattan, they were hiring! She went in for a consultation and a job interview at the same time. When the manager asked why she might want to work there, she said, “Because I understand what everyone is feeling. I get it.”

And today, two years later, with her palm tattoos almost completely gone, you’ll still find her at the same Removery location. Now she works there as a tattoo removal consultant, advising fellow ink-regretters what tattoos to remove and how.