Permanent ink

 Brooklyn

Shall I have my sister’s skin peeled off for display after she dies? Specifically, the tattooed bits — the swatches on either forearm adorned with foliate designs by her favourite artist, and the patch on her wrist inked in her own handwriting with transliterated Hebrew. I’ve always liked them, and not just because they annoy Mother. Should they be separated from her mortal remains, preserved through the wonders of mortuary science, and mounted in a shadow box to grace my bookshelf in her memory? I ran the idea by her the other day while lounging in her Brooklyn garden. Without looking up from the barbecue where she was grilling our formerly free-range dinner, Sister replied, ‘What?’ Her reaction was understandable. She is fashionable, not morbid. She is also in her thirties, in rude good health, and — one has every reason to hope — many decades from death. Even so, I’ve been beset with the question of what to do with her tattooed skin in the unhappy event that she kicks the bucket before me ever since learning that it was possible to do anything with it at all. And why not? Roughly 30 per cent of Americans and 25 per cent of Europeans have at least one tattoo. They are not all regrettable and many were expensively rendered, so it’s only canny that morticians should cater to their remains. ‘It’s like Johnny Depp said, your tattoos tell your story!’ I press on. The Hollywood actor years ago declared his intention to exhibit his inked hide after he dies. Sister is unimpressed and says Depp is ‘disgusting’. On the tattoo-preservation thing, ‘No. It’s too bizarre.’ It’s not, though. Embalmers have been preserving tattoos for centuries, with or without the consent of the tattooed. The Wellcome Collection holds more than 300 sections of inked skin, which it purchased in 1929 from a French osteopath.