Tattoos consist of thousands of particles of tattoo pigment suspended in the skin. While normal human growth and healing processes will remove small foreign particles from the skin, tattoo pigment particles are too big to be removed automatically. Laser treatment causes tattoo pigment particles to heat up and fragment into smaller pieces. These smaller pieces are then removed by normal body processes. Q-switched lasers produce bursts of infrared light at specific frequencies that target a particular spectrum of color in the tattoo ink. The laser passes through the upper layers of the skin to target a specific pigment in the lower layers.