We report on the plume dynamics of the plasma induced by laser ablation of a swine skeletal muscle tissue sample in different vacuum conditions. Pulses from a transversely excited atmospheric CO₂ laser were focused onto a target sample and the induced plasma was allowed to expand in different air pressures. The expansion features were studied using fast photography of the overall visible emission by using a gated intensified charged coupled device. Free expansion and plume splitting were observed at different pressure levels. The expansion of the plasma plume front was analyzed using various expansion models and the velocity of the plume front was estimated. The effect of the number of accumulated laser shots on the crater volume at different ambient air pressures and an elemental analysis of the sample were performed using scanning electron microscopy coupled with energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) analysis. The surface morphology of the irradiated surface showed that increasing the pressure of the ambient gas decreased the ablated mass, or in other words it reduced significantly the laser-target coupling.