Hello there! I've been looking for any other
treatment on Natural Tattoo Removal recently & I've come across to this one
website, a guy who already tried to remove his tattoo by using Apple Cider
Vinegar (ACV) as a main ingredients.
This guy has been a tattoo collector for over a decade,
and am functionally knowledgeable about the medium's technical as well as
cultural aspects. He say this right off the bat because he sure that there will
be people who wish to point out that what he have done was stupid and
dangerous, and they would be correct. So he’s just putting that out there front
and center before anyone assumes that his goal here is to present DIY tattoo removal
as being a "good idea". Do not try this at home if you don’t have guts.
ABOUT THE TATTOO
Just to pre-empt any questions, he told that the original
tattoo was on his left middle finger and intended to look like the symbol used
by the band Cloud Cult. Unfortunately this was a terrible tattoo choice as the
symbol itself does not translate very well into the medium and the space was
far too small for it, anyway. In addition, the application left quite a bit to
be desired and so in general it just looked like a shitty tattoo and I had no
reservations about sacrificing it to this experiment.
ABOUT APPLE CIDER
VINEGAR
This guy has taken organic ACV internally as a probiotic and
preventative immune-booster (among other reasons you can read about elsewhere,
IE joint health) on a near-daily basis for several years now. As a healthcare
provider (current cert: Wilderness EMT) he has used it extensively on friends
and patients as a topical treatment for things like sunburn and poison ivy, as
well as to remove warts (yes, including genital warts but mostly just on
fingers and stuff). His point here being, he have had a working relationship
with ACV for many years and have used it to "burn off" warts on
people before, so he wasn't just flying blind in seeing what would happen with
putting it on a tattoo. He also has a healthcare provider's awareness regarding
things like sterility and infection, so keep that in mind.
Now obviously as opposed to a wart, which is a raised area
and will soak up and react with ACV before the underlying tissue is too badly affected
in most cases, a tattoo is actually under the epidermis and so you'll have to
burn through at least a little bit of yourself to get to it. This process was
extremely painful, though application methods and schedule will have had a lot
to do with that.
THE PROCEDURE (STEPS BY
STEPS)
He began by soaking a small piece of gauze or cotton in ACV
and taping it over the area, making sure to not have the gauze so saturated
that the moisture prevents a firm bandage from holding it in place. At first,
you will not feel any burning sensations. He switched the gauze out every
couple hours as it dried out so that there was always some ACV soaking into the
site. The cumulative effect is what we're after.
After about 24 hours of this (leaving the gauze on overnight)
the site becomes pale and clammy, just like if you'd stayed in the bath too
long. The tissues are starting to break down from the acidity. At this point I
took a sterile needle and "dug out" the dead skin from ONLY directly
over top of the ink deposits, leaving the surrounding tissue alone. This
allowed further applications of the ACV to penetrate directly to the pigment,
as well as encouraging the vinegar to pool in the low channels he had dug out,
where it would concentrate its caustic action and minimize damage to the
surrounding tissues.
At this point he applied another 24 hours worth of ACV,
stopping to further dig out the dead skin over the design as necessary. This is
when the process became extremely painful. In order to speed up the removal he would usually push down on the gauze shortly after applying it, adding some
pressure to the delivery of the acid and making sure that it was concentrated
in the spot he wanted it. The pain is exactly what you might imagine a chemical
burn to be like, and to him it was much, much worse than the original application
of the tattoo.
When he judged that the burn had gone down to where the ink
actually was, he just stopped with the ACV and let the wound heal. Much like in
other removal techniques, the ink "rose to the top" of the wound and
became the scab, which then peeled off in more or less the exact shape of the
tattoo. This is one of the cooler pictures, he think.
Now he had a nasty hollow hole in his finger, which he
allowed to heal naturally with a little bit of help from some tincture of
Western Red Cedar and Oregon Grape (powerful anti-microbials). The
second-to-last photo shows the scar tissue when fully healed, still in the
shape of the original design and with some elements that weren't burned off
still visible. In particular you can notice that the lower-right hand
"leg" of the tattoo seems to fade in and out: this indicates areas
where he wasn't diligent enough in digging down to the pigment with the needle,
vs. areas where he was.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
This method is much too painful and tedious (changing out the
dressing repeatedly over the course of the day) to be seriously used on any
large pieces. In addition, the scarification is potentially quite severe as is
the risk of infection, and the healing process can be lengthy even though the
ACV itself just takes a couple days. He stopped early and got great results,
certainly acceptable in terms of just obscuring a small unwanted tattoo. The
pieces of it that are still visible, he feel confident could be removed fairly
easily by using the same method but with something like a Q-tip for more
precise applications. He would not choose to burn the same area again however,
as the healing could get progressively more problematic.
In situations where it'd be easy enough to just get a cover-up
done, that is obviously going to be your best choice. This form of removal has
the potential to leave too much scar tissue to be successfully tattooed over in
the future, but as a DIY alternative to expensive laser treatments he would say
that it is absolutely viable when it comes to removing small things, slowly.
Hope this has been informative and helpful, even if a lot of
you are shaking your heads in exasperation. Or else, you can try other natural tattoo removal suggested in THIS E-BOOK which has been proven the effectiveness.
BEST OF LUCK GUYS!!