We all have scars. Some are more visible than others.
One recent afternoon on the city’s North Side, Ben Wahhh was in the process of removing a scar from the lower back of a 41-year-old woman named Ella Nelson.
Her scar was in the form of a name, seven letters — P-A-T-R-I-C-K — slightly faded since it was tattooed on her back many years ago, shortly after she had met the man named Patrick and begun living with him.
“It was seven months after we got together,” she said. “He pretty much told me to get it. I was shocked and surprised. But I said OK. We were in love, or at least that’s what I thought. It was done in somebody’s basement. And then it wasn’t too long until he started to physically abuse me.”
Wahhh just listened as Nelson talked, telling how she finally left the dangerous relationship and has been trying to start a new life. He does not “intrude or patronize,” he says. “For many women, what I do is help them reclaim their bodies. I never ask, ‘What’s your story?’ They have been branded. They have been hurt, burned with cigarettes and scarred in so many other ways.”
The majority of his customers come in for tattoos of a conventional and artful sort. He is relatively new to this world, which began for him early in 2025 when he received a phone call from an organization called Salt & Light Coalition, a Chicago-based nonprofit.
Wahhh was asked if he would be willing to transform a tattoo.
He immediately said yes.
Quickly, he saw a “tremendous need” and, with the help of an attorney friend, founded Ink Relief, a charity that supports “survivors of human trafficking, domestic violence and gang markings by offering free cover-up tattoos to help remove the marks of their past … to help them reclaim their bodies and their stories.”
I first met Wahhh nearly a decade ago, when I wandered into his Deluxe Tattoo at 1459 W. Irving Park Road, a colorful and busy shop.
He is now in his mid-50s, he does not drink or do drugs, hasn’t for more than two decades. His wife Alison is a hair colorist and they have a 12-year-old boy named Smith and a 16-year-old girl named Grey. The kids do not have tattoos, and the family lives in the Tri-Taylor neighborhood on the Near West Side.
He told me about his unusual last name, explaining that it was his professional name, adopted in his early 20s, “because then I wasn’t sure that I would be staying in the tattoo business, so I didn’t want to use my real name.”
That real last name is Lewis, and he is the youngest of four children of Arnold Lewis, an administrator and coach with City Colleges of Chicago, and Amelia Lewis, a longtime Chicago Public Schools teacher. His interest in art sparked when he worked as a kid in a comic book store near his home. He attended suburban Homewood-Flossmoor High School before attending a couple of art schools and the University of Illinois at Chicago. His intention was to become an illustrator and art instructor. But the tattoo world beckoned.
“You don’t need to be an awesome artist to be a tattoo artist,” he told me. “I know award-winning tattoo artists who couldn’t draw a stick figure.”
But he is an artist and worked at a couple of shops before opening his own in 1997. He has won many awards for his work. He and Deluxe Tattoo and some of the 11 artists at his shop are known worldwide.
The journalist, book author, teacher and radio host (with Greg Kot on “Sound Opinions”) Jim DeRogatis is a longtime customer and has written for WBEZ that “Ben is a true artist, needless to say. But he’s also a perfectionist who cares deeply about every drop of ink applied to any customer who walks in the door.”
Wahhh’s career coincided with, and has benefited from, tattoos moving from society’s fringes (military vets, bikers, ex-convicts, gangbangers) into the mainstream and onto the bodies of school teachers, dentists, and maybe the person sitting next to you.
He and his Deluxe colleagues are busy, but he has begun devoting some of his time and artistry to women seeking a way to escape from the horrors of their pasts.
“There is a tremendous amount of work that must be done, and a number of hurdles involved in turning a life around,” he says. “There are lawyers, doctors, psychologists. My part is transforming lives by transforming skin.”
The need is huge. According to figures from the National Domestic Violence Hotline, 12 million people experience domestic and intimate partner violence annually, with approximately 24 people physically abused every minute. The vast majority are women and many suffer in silence.
“I never had enough money to remove the tattoo,” said Nelson. “I don’t even think I knew that was possible, but I am happy it is happening.”
Wahhh does not charge for his work and aims to spread the word.
“I am new to this fundraising world,” he says. “Almost every day, I send emails to people and various organizations asking for donations. I do not get paid for my work, but there are many others around the country who would like to do this too and deserve to have something to cover their costs.”
It takes him hours of work to transform the name on Nelson’s back into a flowery image, the name vanished. She will be taking a bus or two back to a “recovery home” in which she lives in the West Loop. She has an adult son out on his own and two younger kids, who live with her mother. She works at Popeyes and hopes to go to nursing school. Patrick, she says, is in prison.
rkogan@chicagotribune.com
