PLEASE DON’T BURY MY TATTOO

A ten-year-old boy in West Virginia helped pick out which of his father’s tattoos would be hanging on the family wall. And no, I’m not talking about a picture or some reproduction. I’m talking about the actual tattoo, complete with the skin it was originally attached to.

I had no idea this was a thing, or even legal, but you can have your tattoos removed after you die, preserved, framed, and delivered to your family. There’s a company in Ohio called Save My Ink Forever that specializes in exactly this sort of thing, which opens up an entirely new category of decisions I never expected to discuss with a funeral director.

Forget the flowers, skip the expensive casket, and whatever you do, don’t cremate that grim reaper on my back. My daughter wants it for the living room, would be the conversation I’d have with a funeral director!!!

The company was founded by funeral professionals who developed a process for preserving tattooed skin. The finished artwork is placed behind protective glass, allowing families to keep the actual tattoo instead of a simple pic. It sounds like something you’d encounter in an antique medical museum, but these pieces are going home to ordinary families.

In 2025, Angelica Radevski lost her husband, TJ, who had more than seventy tattoos. Their ten-year-old son, Preston, remembered his father’s Pittsburgh Steelers tattoo as a favorite, and the family selected that one to preserve. A mortician removed the tattooed skin and sent it to Save My Ink Forever. About three months later, it came home in a frame.

Man, the idea really fucks with me. It’s hard to process that my pop pop’s Navy tattoo could be next to our family portraits. I kinda like it in a weird and macabre way, but fuck dude, lol.

Anyways, back to Preston. He recognized a piece of artwork his father had carried for years, and his mother described being able to hold the frame as something a photograph couldn’t quite replace. I can appreciate and respect that.

I’ve gone down plenty of rabbit holes, and there’s a shitload of mentions out there about this subject. I’ll tippy touch just a little…….… Like, Japanese physician Masaichi Fukushi who collected tattooed human skin during the twentieth century, I’ll write more about this interesting cat. Then there are collections of preserved tattooed skin in museums all over the fucking place! Gives me an idea about writing a book about it and listing all of these museums.

I’ve already made contact with the peeps at Save My Ink Forever, and they’ve agreed to an interview, so I’ll be talking with them soon. I’ve got plenty of questions about the preservation process, the requests they’ve received, and whether anything still manages to surprise people whose business involves framing actual human skin. I’m really curious about the conversations families have when deciding which tattoos deserve a place on the wall.

At Inker, we spend a lot of time looking at tattoos and the artists who create them. This business and subject takes the discussion way the fuck beyond selecting designs, comparing portfolios, or deciding which arm gets the next piece.

Going to end this article with a mental vision, that I’d like to paint for you……… Back in West Virginia, a kid has his father’s Steelers tattoo preserved in a frame. His dad had more than seventy tattoos, but Preston knew exactly which one he wanted. I wonder how many of us have a tattoo our kids could identify without ever seeing our faces.

J Gekko
Staff Writer, Inker