In Thomas Boland’s home in Queens, N.Y., a display in his living room to memorialize his brother includes a bottle of Jack Daniels, a bottle of vodka, and a wall hanging.
But this particular piece of artwork isn’t just a print from a favorite artist that reminds Boland of his brother, or a photograph of the late Joseph Patrick Boland III, who died in March 2019.
It is a piece of Joseph. Literally.
Behind the glass is the tattoo of a four-leaf clover that Joseph had inked on his hand in New York City. Its now-permanent status was the work of Mike and Kyle Sherwood, a father and son team of morticians who started their Cleveland-based company, Save My Ink Forever, in 2016.
“They preserved it, and it’s beautiful. I look at it every day and it gives me a little peace, knowing your loved one is still with you,” Boland said. “It does a little more than a picture does, because it’s more personal.”
The Sherwood father and son duo, who are second- and third-generation funeral directors and licensed embalmers, developed a proprietary process to preserve a deceased person’s tattooed skin, which they then have placed behind museum-quality glass, and presented to loved ones. Thus far, they haven’t found anyone else who provides the same or similar service now, although tattoo removal from the dead does have a history.
“One of [my dad’s] buddies approached him and brought up the idea of preserving his tattoo,” Kyle Sherwood said. “We kind of laughed it off at first, but he was serious, and the more we looked into it, the more we saw the drive to do this. We thought ‘hey, this is actually a unique way of memorializing someone.’ So we took our funeral background and the fact that we have tattoos, and say ‘let’s give this a try.’ ”
The process
The Sherwoods formulated their process after a two-year learning curve that involved trial and error on skin specimens from living humans. To perfect the practice, they offered to pay for individuals’ tummy tuck surgeries (also known as abdominoplasty), if they would first get tattooed in the area to be removed.
“Once the skin was removed, they willed us that tattoo and excised skin and that was our practicing point,” Sherwood said.
The Sherwoods wouldn’t give away too many secrets from inside their lab, but talked about the procedure in general.
Funeral homes and crematories in 20 states have agreed to work with the company to offer the tattoo-excising practice, including in Ohio. Once Save My Ink Forever is contacted about preserving a tattoo, the company will send out a kit to recover the excised tissue.
Inside the kit is a dried preservative that will protect the skin from decay during shipping time, Sherwood said. The Sherwoods request that they are contacted within 48 to 72 hours so they can get the kit out, but say the skin can be extracted before or after embalming and memorial services, he said.
“Our services don’t interrupt other services a family has. The main thing is that once the tattoos are in our dried preservative, they are fine for the length of shipping until we receive them,” he said.
The multi-stage preservation process, which includes framing, takes 3 to 4 months to complete, and can cost anywhere from $1,600 to $100,000, according to Sherwood.
An artistic perspective
The extraction of Joseph Boland’s four-leaf clover tattoo was not only a way to memorialize him, but a way to identify him. Joseph was traveling in southeast Asia when he died unexpectedly, and was well into decomposition when his body was finally returned to the United States more than a week later, said Thomas Boland, a New York City firefighter, and a motorcycle and tattoo enthusiast.
“I am heavily tattooed myself so I can appreciate the artwork,” Thomas Boland said. “The tattoo my brother had was done by a well-known tattoo artist so [the preservation] also puts more value on other people.”
For his largest project yet, Kyle Sherwood in 2018 flew to Saskatoon, Canada, in the province of Saskatchewan. It was there that he assisted with the extraction of tattooed skin from about 80 percent of the body of Chris Wenzel, a long-time tattoo artist who told his wife he wanted the tattoos preserved after his death, Sherwood said.
The extraction crew worked to excise tattooed carefully inked, brilliantly orange koi, demon-headed turtles, perfectly shaded skulls, and carefully crafted cresting waves from the man’s chest, back, arms and legs before transporting the skin back to Ohio.
“We put him in all clear lucite containers … we didn’t want frames to take away from the exact sheer awe of his pieces,” Sherwood said. “The work that some of these guys are doing is truly art, you can’t deny it. Just because it’s ink on skin? Eh, different medium.”
Some might see it as just having a piece of their loved one, but as someone who has been tattooing for a dozen years, Mike Klein, owner of Toledo’s Ink & Iron, can appreciate the modernized idea of a carefully done, artistic tattoos being preserved beyond a lifetime.
“We put so much time and effort into our tattoos as artists that we view in on a different plane,” he said. “You are talking about thousands and thousands of dollars spent on artwork that just ends up in the ground. I’m definitely on board with it.”
The tattoo industry generated about $2 billion in revenue in 2019, and is expected to grow by about 8 percent annually, over the next decade, according to the market research firm IBISWorld.
Ethics and law
Save My Ink Forever will only put a person’s tattoo behind glass.
“We are not going to do book covers or lampshades or anything like that,” Kyle Sherwood said. “We are not trying to make this a circus freak show; we want to do something with dignity as a memorialization for the family, and for a memorialization of the art itself.”
Legally, the practice appears sound, said the company’s counsel, Cleveland attorney, Don Ferfolia, who has studied administrative law surrounding the service and works with regulatory agencies in each state. The State of Oregon is the only state currently still deciding if the process is outside the scope of practice, he said.
“We haven’t run into any obstacles,” Ferfolia said. “Where I have seen more questions is who has the right to make a decision about preservation and who has the right to make the decision on exactly what is preserved. My research in states where we have had questions shows that whoever has the right of disposition [for funeral services] has the right to make the decision on exactly what is preserved.”
The practice of removing tattooed skin from an individual when they die, or cherishing human remains in different ways, does have history to it.
In Japan hundreds of years ago, members of an underground class of criminals, known as the yakuza, inked tattoos as a symbol of status, and would pay for others to host artwork that could be extracted as full body canvases after death and sold on the underground black market.
In Victorian times, family members would keep lengths of hair and create “mourning jewelry.”
Individuals today incorporate cremated remains in glass sculptures and necklaces, and family members often divide cremated remains among children or siblings, Ferfolia said.
The Sherwoods have seen public opinion on both ends of the spectrum, their methods garnering both gratitude and disgust. Ethically, there are some who just don’t get it, Kyle Sherwood said.
“The only backlash that we’ve had are kind of knee-jerk reactions to people not understanding it. And that is one of those things we are OK with. We know that this is not for everybody, and we are not trying to please everybody,” he said. “One of the big sticking points we had is if you don’t have tattoos you can’t necessarily understand or grasp what a tattoo can mean to someone, what it can mean to a relative or family member person or their family.
“Not only do tattoos tell a story or have an artistic value, but there’s meaning behind them. You get tattoos for relatives – a tattoo of your mom or a handprint or footprint of our children. For somebody else to judge what that can mean to somebody, that’s not for them to say.”
First Published March 15, 2020, 12:30 p.m.
