tattoos

Weird News of the Day: Family of Embalmers Preserves Dead People’s Tattoos, Turns Them Into Wall Art

You can’t take it with you. That’s what people say when referencing the afterlife. You can’t take your mounds of money or your fancy home or your speedy sports car. (We can only hope to live long enough to acquire such things.) Now, you can add tattoos to that list.

“What?!” you exclaim. “But tattoos are permanent! They are coming with me to the grave!” Nope. Not anymore — if one family of funeral directors and embalmers have their way. Let us introduce you to Save My Ink Forever, a business run by Michael and Kyle Sherwood. These two are, um, carving out a niche in the marketplace for mourners who want to save their deceased loved ones’ tats.

Simply stated, they remove the tattoos from the corpse, preserve it with a super-secret technique, then mount and frame the fleshy artwork behind UV-protective glass. The process takes around four months to complete. You can even have it done before the funeral and still show off your beloved’s dead body at an open-casket ceremony.

Saving your kin’s ink doesn’t come cheap, though; five square inches will cost you $1,599, including framing and shipping. Full-body tattoos are upwards of $100,000. (Please, for the love of God, don’t do this to your dead person.)

While many see the expenditure as a form of memorializing their dead relative, others see it as art preservation. “Some of the tattoo artists today are modern-day Michelangelos and Picassos,” Kyle told Mel magazine. “My philosophy is that you wouldn’t burn or bury a Picasso.”

The Sherwoods do have their limits, though – they won’t do full-face or genital tats. Aw, shucks. We really wanted to mount Uncle Al’s ballsack tat on our living room wall.

Cover Photo: NBCUniversal

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