The other day, a friend of mine was released from prison. During his "vacation," he acquired several--and by several, I mean at least five or six--new tattoos. Aside from the fact that prison is the absolute riskiest place to get a tattoo, it occurred to me that some of these tattoos he might come to regret later in life. This got me to thinking about the worst ideas for tattoos I'd ever seen. Here are some of them.

Any tattoo that covers a large part of your face. People need to remember that most people find themselves in need of going to job interviews dozens of times during their lives. And try as they might to ignore them, it's hard for an interviewer to look past some overly-prominent tattoos on the face. After all, your face is precisely where you hope the prospective will be looking during the course of the interview.

A tattoo with your boyfriend / girlfriend's name, especially in a prominent place. No matter how infatuated you might feel about the person right now, there's a good possibility that this person won't be your life-long soul-mate. You might just find yourself dating someone else in the near future--with a different name, in most cases.

A tattoo that is publicly seen which disparages other religions. How can you hope to ever have a civil conversation with a Jew if you have swastikas on your body? And can you expect a Christian to have a good first impression if you have anything that suggests you hate Jesus or churches? Maybe you think right now that you don't want to associate with them anyway. But what if they sign your paycheck?

A tattoo by a tattoo "artist" with inferior art skills. This is no joke: I once saw a tat that looked like it could have been Elvis or it could have been Celine Dione. I'm sure it was meant to be one or the other; I'm equally sure it wasn't supposed to be both. Best check your tattoo artists references before committing.

Any tattoo that's done by a friend which takes more than one session to complete. I have one reason for this: I've seen several instances in which the friend just never gets around to finishing it. One guy had a huge heart tattooed on his back, with a black outline where a person' s name was clearly supposed to go. But the friend / tat artist couldn't find time to finish it. So even in the middle of summer, this guy was afraid to walk around shirtless because of a clearly-incomplete tat.

So what's a person to do if he's gotten any of these bad-idea tattoos? Fortunately today, there are several removal methods available, including laser removal, salabrasion (scrubbing the skin with salt), excision (cutting off the skin with the tattoo) and home-removal kits, like Nuviderm.