Pete Davidson paid a pretty penny to tone down his tattoos.
A source tells PEOPLE that the actor and Saturday Night Live alum, 30, has spent $200,000 to undergo the process of having his multiple inkings removed from his body.
“He just woke up one day and wanted them gone, and it’s been a years-long process,” the source says of the procedure.
A second source adds that the tattoo removal is also marking a fresh start for Davidson, who “has been sober since September, and gained twenty pounds.”
“Things are going really well for him,” the insider tells PEOPLE. “Things are heading in the right direction, and he’s receiving excellent reviews for the movie.’”
Miley Cyrus and Pete Davidson Reveal They Got Matching Tattoos After Saturday Night Live in 2017
Davidson’s tattoos ranged from tributes to past girlfriends to a portrait of Hillary Clinton, but he has been speaking out since at least 2020 expressing his interest in having them removed in order to continue his career in acting.
“I honestly never thought that I would get an opportunity to act and I love it a lot,” Davidson previously said on Late Night with Seth Meyers in May 2021. “It takes like three hours — you have to get there like three hours earlier — to cover all your tattoos. For some reason, people in movies, they don’t have them that much.”
A few months later, Davidson gave an update to PEOPLE about how the removal process was going and said that he hoped to be done with it by age 30.
“I get my next treatment [in] like a month or so. They said by the time I’m 30, they should all be gone. So they got like two more years left of this,” he explained.
In addition to him having the initials “KNSCP” (Kardashian and her four children’s initials — North, Saint, Chicago and Psalm, whom she shares with her ex-husband Kanye West), Davidson also had a memorable moment with the reality star, 44, inked on his body.
“He’s still friends with pretty much all his exes. Nothing bad happened between him and Madelyn [Cline]. It just ran its course. He and Kim still talk occasionally. He’s a good guy, and they root for him,” the source adds
