It would be nice if there was a cream or a lotion that you could put on your skin to erase tattoos.

Unfortunately, there isn't one. IT IS IMPOSSIBLE. The ink is under a few layers of dead skin, a few layers of living skin, and a watertight membrane known as the basement membrane.

Some substances can penetrate the surface of the skin, such as Nicotine and Phenol, but larger molecules can't.

It's possible that future technologies will allow larger molecules, such as Insulin, past the top layer of skin. My favorite sub-dermal transport technologies are sonomacroporation and micro-needle arrays.

Even if you could open a path into your skin, getting ink out is still going to be next to impossible.

My sister Susan has a striking blue tattoo on her arm, which she volunteered in a dramatic trial of a new dermal cleanser called "Dial Complete Foaming soap". 

After she applied the gentle lathering soap to her skin, she smoothed the lather around in small circles.

This step is important so I can get a photo of it, but will do nothing to remove the ink from her skin.

Luckily, Adobe invented Photoshop, so removing tattoos has never been easier!

After a few minutes, I had made the tattoo look a bit lighter.

Then I rotated, zoomed, faded and re-cropped the photo for an "even lighter" photo.

Notice how the background is the same? looking at the background can help determine if a photo is new, or has just been modified in an editing program.

Zoom, rotate, crop, lighten.

Look! It is really fading!

A little more fading and the tattoo was almost gone.

Finally the tattoo was completely removed. The bottle of Dial Complete was very expensive, at $3,500.00, but to Sue, it had been worth it!

She was finally able to replace the tattoo with a portrait of Ira Glass.