Imagine being stuck forever in the clothes you bought in high school. The concert tee and acid-washed jeans seemed cool at 17.
But in your 40s, nobody wants that.
For Jeff Garnett, co-founder of Inkless Tattoo Removal, it’s an analogy he uses to explain why so many of his clients aren’t actually done with tattoos — they’re just done with the wrong ones.
“I would say probably 60% of our clients want to remove their tattoos and just want to get rid of what they have,” said Garnett. “The other 40% still love tattoos and want to get more tattoos. And they don’t want a big dark cover-up. So they want to lighten what they have first so they can replace it with a design that they love instead of a design that just has to be dark enough to cover what’s there.”
Just as we update our wardrobes, he said, technology is making it easier to erase an old sleeve of tattoos and replace it with a new one.
As part of the grand opening of the new Inkless location in Casper, Garnett is sharing stories about the tattoos he’s removed — like the bat hanging upside down, which he had erased from behind his ear.
“My first couple of experiences were pretty negative,” he said. “The old lasers only worked on black ink and red ink. The healing was nasty. You would get big blisters, and some people would get scars.”
Casper is the sixth U.S. location for Inkless, following clinics in Lakewood, Colorado; Manhattan and Oceanside, New York; Philadelphia; and Wayne, New Jersey.
It came onto the company’s radar after Garnett noticed a steady stream of Wyoming residents making the four- or five-hour drive south to the Colorado location — because not enough specialists existed in-state.
“I was shocked by how many people were driving hours from Wyoming,” Garnett said. “I found a couple of mixed medispas with lasers, but most had older technology and didn’t really specialize in it.”
Body Fights
Here’s the core challenge of tattoo removal: Breaking up the ink in a middle layer of skin without breaking the surface. Break the top, and you trade a tattoo for a scar.
The solution is tuning a laser to a specific wavelength so it passes harmlessly through skin and targets only the pigment below.
“Laser goes right through your skin,” Garnett said. “But when it gets to the ink, the ink absorbs that energy and shatters into millions of microscopic little particles — small enough for your immune system to remove. The ink never comes to your skin. It gets filtered through your immune system and passes out of your body as waste.”
That biological cleanup is essentially what tattoos do naturally over decades.
The immune system attacks ink constantly, which is why old tattoos look faded and blurry. The problem is that ink particles are larger than white blood cells, so normal fading takes a lifetime.
“We’re just speeding up the natural fading process,” he said. “You get 10 to 20 years' worth of fading in about two months. Then you wait two months, give your body time to clean up, and come back and repeat.”
Overall health and circulation affect results. Strong immune systems mean faster fading; tattoos on the torso clear faster than those on the feet. Even ink quality matters — cheap ink breaks down quickly, while high-end synthetic ink formulated to never fade takes longer.
It started off as a good idea, but years later, not so much. So Inkless co-founder erased the bat behind his ear. (Courtesy Inkless) 
It started off as a good idea, but years later, not so much. So Inkless co-founder erased the bat behind his ear. (Courtesy Inkless)
Kid’s Party
Opening the Casper location traces back to a conversation at a child’s birthday party.
Rachel Bowron and her husband Ward moved to Casper about two and a half years ago. At a kid’s party, Ward fell into conversation with another parent — a tattoo artist — and asked whether there were any tattoo removal businesses in town.
“The guy’s like, ‘No — that would be a really good idea,’” Bowron recalled. “And so that was probably a year and a half ago.”
The notion took root. Ward began asking patients at Wyoming Wound Care — the couple’s separate outpatient wound care clinic — about their tattoos. Many said they were already driving to Colorado for removal. The couple eventually called Inkless, and a partnership followed.
“It took a while to get off the ground,” Bowron said. “I think they wanted to make sure it was a good fit.”
What the Bowrons found when they looked closely at Wyoming surprised them.
“Ward and I were blown away by the culture of tattoos here,” Bowron said. “We knew it would attract people who want to get rid of tattoos that carry emotional weight, but also people wanting something new — needing that blank canvas.”
With Casper’s central position in the state, the new clinic hopes to draw clients from well beyond the city.
“Our hope is to attract people from all over the state,” Bowron said, “so that they don’t have to travel to Colorado.”
Clearing Slate
Bailey Binder, owner of Amethyst Ink tattoo studio in downtown Casper, knows that Colorado commute well. She had been making the roughly four-hour drive to the Inkless location in Lakewood to address what she plainly calls a really bad chest tattoo.
It started as two flowers — not quite the style she’d envisioned. Another artist then tried adding a raven on top. The result was dark, scarred and nothing like what she’d imagined. Cover-up followed cover-up until she reached a conclusion: start completely from scratch.
“My frontal lobe was not developed when I was doing those,” Binder said with a laugh. “I have a way cooler idea and it’s going to match the tattoo styles that I have now, way more.”
About four sessions in, the progress has been significant — though another six to eight sessions remain given how dark and layered the piece became. The end goal is a blank canvas to finally get the tattoo she actually wants.
“I just honestly cannot wait to get a new tattoo over this,” she said. “It’s been a life-changing experience.”
Asked whether tattoo removal signals a retreat from body art, Binder pushed back.
“Tattoos are really popular,” she said. “People are just putting a little more thought into what they really want this time around. They want something way better now.”
Whether it’s a total tattoo removal or a lightening process that allows an artist to add a brand new tattoo on top of the old one, sessions are spread out over weeks and months and can take up to a year for certain really dark, embedded tattoos. (Courtesy Inkless) 
Whether it’s a total tattoo removal or a lightening process that allows an artist to add a brand new tattoo on top of the old one, sessions are spread out over weeks and months and can take up to a year for certain really dark, embedded tattoos. (Courtesy Inkless)
Grand Opening
The Inkless Casper clinic is offering a first-session special at $100.
After that, pricing is based on size: small pieces run $250 per session, medium $350, large $450.
The laser at the heart of the Inkless approach — the PicoWay — earned FDA clearance in November 2014 after multicenter clinical trials in which 86% of subjects achieved at least 50% tattoo clearance after just three treatments, with no serious adverse events, according to company materials.
What distinguishes it from earlier equipment is its picosecond pulse duration — one trillionth of a second — generating an ultra-short, high-power burst that shatters ink particles more efficiently and with less thermal damage to surrounding tissue. The dual-wavelength design covers virtually all ink colors on all skin types, solving a problem that stumped earlier single-wavelength machines.
Most Wyoming providers, Garnett said, rely on tools designed for laser facials and hair removal.
Describing Casper, Garnett said, “I grew up right around New York City, where people could be a little abrasive. Everyone there really was very welcoming. It definitely was a nice change of pace. You guys definitely weren’t kidding about the wind.”
David Madison can be reached at david@cowboystatedaily.com.
