Underneath Rebecca Janesko's red power suit, a black-and-green lizard snakes up her calf and a sunflower wraps around her wrist.

For Janesko, of Overbrook, these are her scars of rebellion, 13-year-old tattoos that speak of a different time and a different person, before she had a daughter and a car payment.

But instead of wincing every time she caught sight of her tattoos, Janesko called Molly Wagner, a medical aesthetician at the Hurwitz Center for Plastic Surgery in Oakland, and joined a growing number of the formerly inked who go to painful lengths to have their body art removed.

On this day, Janesko gritted her teeth and held back tears as Wagner zapped her tattooed wrist with a laser.

"Some people say it feels like a rubberband snapping on their skin," Wagner said, "but the blast can feel electrical."

Wagner practices two tattoo removal techniques: the laser, which bursts the ink apart, and Tat Gone Ink, which is a colorless pigment tattooed over the original design that forces the ink to bubble up to the top. In both processes, the skin will scab and shed layers.

With the laser, "I hear a 'pop' when it breaks through. I jump, the patient jumps, and I know it hurt like hell," Wagner said. "Even if I put the laser on the lowest setting, it's going to feel like I put an iron on your back."

Wagner charges $200 a treatment, either with the laser or Tat Gone Ink. It can take anywhere from one to 40 treatments for the tattoo to fade, and often, that's all it does. How long the person has had the tattoo, how deep the artist tattooed, the colors -- everything plays into the formula.

"It's a horrible, horrible process, but they don't hear anything you say," Wagner said of her growing list of clients. She's up to 58 now. "They have it in their head they want this thing gone."

Three years and six treatments later, Janesko's tattoos are faded, the designs indistinguishable. But the ink's still there in strange clusters, like a smudged bar stamp after a weekend party night.

Because it takes at least six weeks for the skin to heal between treatments, and because treated tattoos cannot be exposed to the sun, Janesko said she has been able to fit in only two treatments per winter season. It took only an afternoon to ink the original designs.

A half-dozen tattoo parlors line a couple blocks of Carson Street in the South Side, where Emil Paternoster works as an artist at Tattoo You Too. Paternoster said he will not tattoo someone who seems impatient (i.e. impulsive) or who keeps changing their mind between two or three designs. He also tries to dissuade couples from getting each other's names or wedding bands tattooed.

"The name tattoos of today are the cover-up jobs of tomorrow," Paternoster said.

Jonathan Farrell, 24, of the South Side, labored over his tattoo design, inspired by a Man Ray work that showed guitar symbols on a woman's back. He liked the idea of his body as an instrument.

Now, the black curling tattoos on his forearms simply remind him of more angst-ridden days and a lifestyle he no longer lives.

"It was bothering me every day. I was obsessing about it," Farrell said. "It's kind of a paradox, how you get a tattoo for vanity and get it removed for sanity."

Although Farrell has an intricate tattoo design that wraps around his abdomen, it was the state of mind he was in when he got the forearm tattoos and their location that drove him to Wagner's needle.

"I thought when I started into this process it would be relatively easy," said Farrell, his neck brightening with red splotches as the needle buzzed through his forearm. "It's strange. I never thought of myself as someone who'd end up in a plastic surgeon's office."

Wagner has heard every story. She worked on one woman whose mother said she'd disinherit her if she had a tattoo. Another woman called her in tears because her fiance was threatening to break up with her after an impulsive Saturday-night tattoo session.

"I'm like, 'Dump him. It would be so much cheaper,'" Wagner said. "There is no quick fix."