Pearlman at work in Homeboy Industries’ free clinic

REMOVING A tattoo is painful—like bacon grease or a hot rubber band snapping up against the skin. I usually need eight to 10 sessions to fully remove the ink. A session doesn’t last long, but it can be 10 seconds of pure agony. I recommend using a numbing cream beforehand, but patients often decline. It’s almost like they think they deserve the pain as a price for the bad decisions of their past.

Getting a gang tattoo is your entrée into that life. And when you’re leaving that life behind, having a tattoo removed helps to close the door on that chapter. It can be transformational and liberating. So even after the most painful removal sessions, almost every person says thank you.

I got into this by happenstance. In 2000, when I was still working as a physician, I met a young doctor who told me about Homeboy Industries, an L.A.-based nonprofit that helps formerly gang-affiliated, incarcerated or trafficked men and women to become productive members of society. It provides job training in the Homeboy Bakery and Homegirl Café, and at electronics recycling and silkscreen and embroidery social enterprises. When I heard about Homeboy’s tattoo removal program, I immediately volunteered to help. In 2015, after I retired from full-time emergency medicine practice, I took over as the volunteer medical director for the clinic.

The Ya ’Stuvo (“that’s enough!” in colloquial Spanish) Tattoo Removal Clinic is a busy place—we remove tattoos from as many as 40 people a day, everything from swastikas to swear words to gang symbols to the names of former partners. I have worked on people as young as 13 and as old as 60. I once took care of a woman who had been sexually trafficked. Her trafficker had had his initials tattooed on her. I can’t tell you how important getting those initials removed was to her, and how honored I was to remove them.

It can be tough for the clients, but I love it. I sometimes arrive feeling grumpy or irritated (usually because of the traffic on the freeway), but that all changes when I walk through the door. I’ll hear someone shout, “Doctor P in the house!” And then I happily get to work.

There’s a wonderful vibe here. I’ll meet people from rival gangs who, before, might have killed each other, and now are kneading bread next to each other in the bakery. They remind me that no human being is ever beyond hope. With help, anyone who truly wants to change can turn their life around. —As told to Andrea Atkins

Retired emergency medicine physician Paula Pearlman, 70, lives in Los Angeles.