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I'm Elizabeth Hotson and in today's Business Daily I'll be looking at the lucrative but painful business of tattoo removal.

I'm not going to lie to you. I mean on a scale of 1 to 10 I would say the pain level is probably a good 7 or 8.

8's up there.

We'll hear why people get tattoos removed.

There's generally something that happens,

a trigger in their life that makes them want to remove the tattoo,

and that might be I have now got a child that can read,

and I don't want them to read what I wrote on my body when I was 21 or 22.

And why it's not as straightforward as you might think

to get rid of an unwanted inking.

The tattoo was meant to be a permanent piece of artwork on your body.

It takes multiple sessions over a significant amount of time.

This is Business Daily from the BBC.

I know. Einstein once said that a person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.

But try telling that to someone who got a tattoo that they now bitterly regret.

It might be the name of a long-gone ex-partner or the result of a drunken night out in Magaloof. It could just be that the inspirational quotes that you dreamt up

as an idealistic 19-year-old looks out of place on your world weary torso two decades on.

For all these reasons and many more, there's a huge market for tattoo removal.

In 2021, the global tattoo removal market was valued at over $250 million,

and it's expected to reach over $400 million by 2027.

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