According to Health Central:
"A skin tag is a soft, skin-colored growth that hangs from the surface of the skin on a thin piece of tissue called a stalk. Its medical name is acrochordon. Skin tags are not skin cancer and cannot turn into skin cancer.
Skin tags typically appear as people age. They are quite common in people 60 and older. They are more common in women. A tendency to develop skin tags may run in families.
Skin tags appear most often in skin folds of the neck, armpits, torso, beneath the breasts or in the genital region
This information was incredibly helpful for me, but it didn't keep me from pulling that pesky little skin tag OFF my shoulder. And, since it has a "stalk" which is so completely gross, it BECKONS one to fool with it. You can't NOT pick at it, am I right here? I will say that it bled a WHOLE lot more than I thought it would which caused me to wonder whether or not I should have left that damn thing alone. I don't advise picking a skin tag off because it's kinda painful too, but no more painful than getting a tattoo. I mean, that's what I've heard...that tattoos are kinda painful.
Okay, so I know that kind of pain too. As a matter of fact, I was one of the first 135 women to ever GET a tattoo, and it was back in 1975 before ANY women had tattoos who lived in nice neighborhoods. It was the Yellow Rose over my Texas heart. Husband #1 had moved me from home and hearth and transplanted me in the state of Virginia. After several drinks one night, I wound up at Johnnie and Joe's Tattoo Parlor in some seaside village with my gal pals.
I had blonde hair down to my 23-year-old waist and when the tattoo ‘artiste' (and now I can't remember whether it was Johnnie or Joe) said he was ready, I froze. He then said, "Lady, I ain't got all night, and this needle don't go through cotton."
I had a few seconds for good sense to kick in before I responded, but after a triple-dawg-dare from my compadres, off went the tee shirt and out came the needle and paint.
Over the years, the green stem upon which the yellow rose resides has bent, but every once in a while I notice it and have to smile at my youthful foolishness. I shudder to think what I might have on my body were I a 20-something now-a-days!
Although that tattoo was like having a dentist drill on my skin, some pains can be gotten over, at least physical pains. There are medications for that! There are meds for the other kinds of pain too, but after taking some of those, one sometimes winds up driving nekkid at night straight to a tattoo parlor and not even seeing or feeling that two-headed pink serpent winding it's way up the skin of their arm until the next morning.
