A company is allowing family members to remember their dead loved ones in a kind of fucked up but kind of cool way - by preserving their tattoos as art.
Save My Ink Forever are a business that, according to their website, has “developed a unique proprietary process for preserving tattoos".
Have a look at some of their work below, just make sure you're not eating.
![People are turning their dead loved one’s tats into art and it’s sick in more ways than one](/home/archive/2022/07/people-are-turning-their-dead-loved-ones-tats-into-art-and-its-sick-in-more-ways-than-one/_jcr_content/root/container/container/container_337396831/container_317665506/articlecontentcontai/articlecontentfragme/par1/cmp_1659393141870.coreimg.jpeg/1659393141162/tattooart1.jpeg)
This process involves clients telling Save My Ink what and where the tattoo is. The company then contacts the relevant funeral home, where a mortician then carefully cuts out the tattoo and sends it to Save My Ink’s lab in Ohio.
Bleh.
![People are turning their dead loved one’s tats into art and it’s sick in more ways than one](/home/archive/2022/07/people-are-turning-their-dead-loved-ones-tats-into-art-and-its-sick-in-more-ways-than-one/_jcr_content/root/container/container/container_337396831/container_317665506/articlecontentcontai/articlecontentfragme/par2/cmp_1659393141931.coreimg.jpeg/1659393141308/tattooart2.jpeg)
At the lab, the skin is worked on so that it and the ink stop decomposing.
Kyle Sherwood, tattoo preservationist and COO of Save My Ink, then works his magic on the tattoo so that it looks displayable. The whole process takes around three months.
![People are turning their dead loved one’s tats into art and it’s sick in more ways than one](/home/archive/2022/07/people-are-turning-their-dead-loved-ones-tats-into-art-and-its-sick-in-more-ways-than-one/_jcr_content/root/container/container/container_337396831/container_317665506/articlecontentcontai/articlecontentfragme/par3/cmp_1659393141989.coreimg.jpeg/1659393141475/tattooart3.jpeg)
Sherwood, talking to Vice, said that families are pretty stoked when the finished work arrives.
“The families’ gratitude when they receive the piece and they’re like ‘Oh my God, you know, I feel like they’re here, I saw the tattoo every single day and now I have a piece of that person with me,’” he explained before doubling down on the whole thing not being THAT weird.
Jonathan Gil used the service after his twin brother died in 2019. He said that once he saw his brother’s tattoos turned into art he got emotional, but in a good way.
“Everything kind of came rushing back, but in a weird way it was comforting,” he told Vice.
The whole idea is a bit creepy, but tattoos usually hold a deep meaning to the wearer of them. So crafting a tat into something to remember someone by is pretty understandable.
Whatever floats your boat we say. Unless that boat is a tattoo of Brian Griffin, in which case, just let it rest man.