What happens when Long Beach ink-slinger Kari Barba doesn’t like her own tattoos any more? She has them lasered away

ILLUSTRATION by JOE MCGARRY

Tattoo artists are their own best advertisements, because they’re almost always rakishly tattooed. But what happens when one of them makes a bad choice? Every tattoo artist is 19 once. What happens to their Tasmanian devils, their sports team logos, Van Halen emblems and ex-girlfriends’ names?

Maybe they do what Long Beach-based tattoo artist Kari Barba is doing. Again. At 5 p.m. on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, she makes the trek through rush-hour traffic to the good Dr. Tattoff’s office in Irvine—to get another laser treatment and, she hopes, erase more of a back piece she’s been unhappy with for about 18 years.

In an industry still so new that its impact is being measured, Dr. Tattoff has become one of the standards in tattoo removal, with offices in Beverly Hills, Studio City and Irvine. Once somewhat at odds with the tattoo industry, the two lines of work now mostly complement one another—perhaps because tattoo artists get free tattoo removals here, and military or police personnel get discounts. It’s a good idea.

“I send a lot of people here,” Barba says. “If they have a bad tattoo, I tell them to have it lightened up, and we can do a much more colored, detailed tattoo over the top.” Barba, 47, is famous for her photo-realistic tattoos. She also owns the Outer Limits tattoo archipelago, which stretches from Costa Mesa to Anaheim, terminating with a flourish at the newest location—the former Bert Grimm’s World Famous Tattoo, at what was once the Pike.

Did Bert Grimm ever get a tattoo removed? Unlikely; artists back then would simply tattoo over old work with newer, darker flash.

“We used to tell them, ‘If you get tattooed, it’s stronger than marriage—you can’t get divorced,’” Barba says with a smile. In a nod to changing times, she’s wearing the prototype of a T-shirt produced by Sinful—with artwork of a heron, which she herself designed. Now, tattoo artists are on TV and they design T-shirts which, like the famous Hells Angels’ vest, let you wear your colors and take them off at night. (Or sleep in them.)

“Now, if you don’t like it,” Barba says, “it’s like you can get a divorce.” That’s why she’s here, being interviewed while she waits for the numbing cream to soak into her skin, letting her endure a 10- or 15-minute session of having one of two smaller pieces on her shoulder blades slowly, and somewhat painfully, removed.

There is no Dr. Tattoff; he’s like Bibendum that way. But Dr. Tattoff’s people tell me removal can take months or years for a specific frequency of laser to break up each color of ink in your tattoo, and for it to be safely absorbed by your body. Darker colors vanish first, but your skin must heal six to eight weeks between removal sessions. (And yes: it usually hurts less than being tattooed.)

That’s partly why it’s taken Barba—who is so busy she books tattoo sessions months in advance—this long to have her two scenes, of a hummingbird and of a phoenix, amid flowers, erased. I don’t see it, but she assures me the hummingbird is now just a mass of green (one of the harder colors to erase). Once, when she was 19 and worked in a tattoo studio in her native Minnesota, it was a beautiful piece of artwork on a flat surface.

“I was actually a friend of the tattoo artist. He did it as a gift to me for helping him out with some stuff,” Barba says. “The guy was a good tattooist in his style, but the art he was trying to do didn’t match his ability. Both of these pieces, I was very unhappy with from the moment they were done.” Some good came from it, though: just a few months later, Barba began tattooing on her own.

“That’s why—I started to question,‘Well, does it have to look that way?’” Barba says. “That’s why I started tattooing. I wanted to make it look like the painting.” Today, she’s famous for tattoos that look like the real thing, whether it’s butterflies, surfer girls or Bolivian Squirrel Monkeys.

And, if she keeps going to Dr. Tattoff regularly, some day her own tattoo will be completely . . . light enough to tattoo over. “Yeah,” she says, “that was the whole idea. I have this sleeve here that’s Tahitian tribal and I’m hoping to eliminate the others enough that we can put the new one over.”

Then, the circle of tattoo life will be complete.

DR. TATTOFF 15751 ROCKFIELD BLVD | IRVINE 92618 | 888.828.8633 | DRTATTOFF.COM OUTER LIMITS TATTOO 360 W OCEAN BLVD | LONG BEACH 90802 | 888.518.8288

Tags: dr. tattoff, kari barba, tattoo, tattoo removal