The BBC News article "New Zealand: Prisoners offered cut-price tattoo removal" (2014) reports that a new scheme being tried in New Zealand prisons allows a non-profit group to bring their equipment to remove tattoos into prisons to "erase visible tattoos from faces, necks and lower arms" (para. 2), which can make it difficult for prisoners to get jobs after their release.
Although I like tattooing, I dislike many tattoos. I think that many people get tattoos for foolish reasons or they choose designs that they soon come to regret, so the idea of removal does seem very sensible to me. The article reports that in the US, the state pays the cost of the removal, whereas in New Zealand, the prisoners have pay. I can think of reasons for both approaches, but since the cost is minimal, being done by a non-profit group, I don't think that's a big problem, and perhaps because they do pay the costs, the New Zealand prisoners will value more the results of their decision to remove tattoos that they no longer want.
In the case of the prisoners, they are probably removing tattoos that were the results of bad decisions in the past. Unfortunately, I think some employers, and people at large, have negative views of tattoos, which seems wrong to me. In the past, many cultures saw tattoos as symbols of adulthood or other valued characteristics. I think that they can also be very powerful personal symbols, with carefully planned and well executed tattoos having both artistic merit and meaning for the wearer, and perhaps also those in a group. But it's probably still a good idea to remove the tattoos that identify the wearer as a member of a criminal group - those are the sort of associations that employers and society might very reasonably look on negatively.
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