People Are Preserving Dead Relatives' Tattoos and Turning Them Into Art

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Tattoo artists have a new hustle: recovering ink from bodies of the recently-deceased at the behest of their loved ones.

After a fatal boating accident in 2019, Jonathan Gil was told he wouldn't be able to see the body of his twin brother before he was cremated unless he could identify him by his tattoos. Morticians told him that the body was too waterlogged, and in no condition to be displayed for a wake.

Gil’s brother had several tattoos, and Boyland was able to piece back together two of them and send them to a lab in Ohio. There they would be preserved by Save My Ink Forever, a postmortem tattoo service that turns recovered body ink into fine art collectibles. After the work was done, the funeral director delivered the framed tattoos to Gil and his mother in person.

The proprietary process developed by Save My Ink Forever permanently alters the chemical structure of the skin in a way that preserves ink and prevents skin from decomposing. The company works with private funeral homes in 21 U.S. states and has expanded into Canada and the U.K. To obtain authorization from the family, following next-of-kin direct chain links in accordance with state-specific funeral laws.

“People who want this done, in essence, this is their funeral ceremony,” Kyle Sherwood, the tattoo preservationist and COO of Save My Ink Forever, told Motherboard. “This means more to them than a church service.”






There are no federal or state laws that expressly permit a funeral director to slice off a piece of a person’s skin and mail it to a company to have it preserved. However, more than half of states have criminal statutes—generally known as “abuse of corpse laws”—with criminal penalties for treating human remains in a way the court considers “disrespectful.”

According to Marsh, the criminal abuse of corpse laws would have to be enforced by a county prosecutor, but a complaint would most likely come from a family member if they were to complain to the state regulatory authority. A private claim for emotional harm caused by mistreatment of human remains could also be brought by family members if they see the tattoo removal as mutilation of human remains, which Marsh points out is available in all 50 states.