Long before celebrity tattoo removal was a thing, Megan Fox was lasering Marilyn Monroe off her forearm, and letting the whole thing out on late-night TV.

She got the tattoo at 18. When she was 25, it was the most famous tattoo removal in progress anywhere.

“I’m just over it”

“You outgrow things that you love when you were a child,” she told reporters in 2011 when the removal became public. “I got it when I was 18 and now I’m 25 and it just doesn’t make sense anymore.”

There was more to it than outgrowing. She told the Italian magazine Amica (via Fox News) that Monroe was “a negative character” and that she didn’t “want to attract this kind of negative energy in my life.”

“They can’t numb it enough to make the pain go away.”

— Megan Fox, on The Tonight Show

The popcorn description

Her account of the sessions, delivered on The Tonight Show in 2012 (via Today), is still one of the most vivid on record: “Your skin sort of explodes and looks like little kernels of popcorn popping up.”

And then the line that gets quoted in every removal article since: “They can’t numb it enough to make the pain go away.”

On Ellen the same year, she put a number on it: “I’ve only done one session on it, but it is incredibly, incredibly painful.” She estimated three or four more to go. “It’s a hundred times worse than the tattoo itself,” she said elsewhere that year.

Megan Fox at TIFF in September 2011, the same year she told reporters the Marilyn was coming off. Photo by Ed Van-West Garcia, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The regret

Fox has said everyone warned her. “I was stubborn and I thought that I would love it forever, or that it would be like a book of my life, all the things that I loved when I was younger,” she said. “And it’s not that at all.”

Getting a tattoo at 18 and un-getting it at 25 — the psychology of tattoo regret covers why that seven-year window shows up again and again.

A hundred times worse

Fox’s removal ran a handful of sessions on one small portrait, and she called it a hundred times worse than the needle. Pete Davidson is doing that roughly 200 times over.

How many sessions removal takes will break it all down for a normal amount of ink.

A note on this guide

Tattoo Takeoff is an independent, research-based resource. It is not a clinic and does not perform removal, and nothing here is medical advice. Every account in this article traces to the named interview or appearance it came from.

Last reviewed: September 12, 2026. Updated as we learn more.

Featured photo: Megan Fox, by Kevin Paul, licensed under CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons . Cropped

Sources

“Megan Fox details the pain of having her tattoos removed,” Today, February 2012

“Megan Fox: Tattoo Removal Is ‘Incredibly Painful’,” E! News, March 2012

“Celebrities with tattoos they regret,” Fox News

“Celebrities Who’ve Had Their Tattoos Removed,” Us Weekly via Yahoo