4 minute read
Skin in the Frame
Skin Frame the
Meet Northeast Ohio’s tattoo preservation experts.
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Alex Bieler
It’s another typical Tuesday night when Mike and Kyle Sherwood receive an email from a man who wants the duo to remove most of his skin. Such a request may provoke images of Silence of the Lambs or Craigslist ads gone wrong, but the email is simply business as usual for the duo.
Mike and Kyle are the father-son team of morticians behind Save My Ink Forever, a tattoo preservation service based in Twinsburg. Instead of burying or cremating tattoos along with the body, Mike and Kyle work with people to save and frame pieces for posterity. To do so, the duo developed a process to preserve excised skin so that the art lasts beyond a single lifetime.
On this particular Tuesday, there are 13 different tattoos arranged on the table in their Twinsburg office, ranging from large torso pieces
to a tattoo the size of a postage stamp. According to the duo, Save My Ink Forever is the only tattoo preservation company you’ll find, and business has grown notably in the past few years. However, their success wasn’t always clear after a slow start.
The idea for Save My Ink Forever came from a cordial conversation over a few drinks back in 2014. Mike was over at a friend’s house when his buddy had suggested that it would be cool to have his tattoos saved and preserved inside the riding club he ran. Mike and Kyle did more than just agree – they saw an opportunity.
While excited about this new venture, there was a notable problem – the two morticians needed to figure out how to preserve tattoos. Kyle and Mike needed fresh samples to develop a process, so they figured out a way to entice willing volunteers to help them practice.
How to Save Your Ink Forever
Do you or a loved one have some skin you’d like to save? Turns out it’s a fairly simple process (at least for the people not preserving skin).
As you may expect, the process starts with death. Once the
person with the tattoo in question dies, it’s important to have your funeral home or crematory contact Save My Ink Forever within 72 hours. If you don’t have one in mind, you can check out their website to find a preferred provider in your area. Once Mike and Kyle hear from you and your business of choice, they’ll email over a permission to excise tissue form. Once the form is notarized, it’s time to get to work. Before they excise the skin, Mike and Kyle have the embalmer take photos of the skin the client wants removed and measure any applicable tattoos. If neither Mike nor Kyle can come out to the location to excise the skin, they’ll send an instructional video to train the embalmer how to remove, store, and ship the tattoo to Save My Ink Forever so Mike and Kyle can begin the three-month-long preservation process. So how much does the whole process cost? A five-by-fiveinch tattoo will cost $1,599, which includes tattoo removal, preservation, framing, and shipping. The framing is done to archival standards, which includes UVprotective glass to further protect the art. In general, the total cost goes up $100 per square inch, although Save My Ink Forever provides custom pricing for larger pieces and multiple tattoos.
The solution? Free tummy tucks.
“Instead, he
wants his skin formed to a 3D dummy – a flesh mannequin, so to speak." The plan was simple – anyone interested would get tattoos on the skin removed during the tummy tuck process. In exchange, Mike and Kyle received fresh skin samples for preservation practice. Fortunately for the morticians, there were plenty of people willing to stomach a few tattoos in exchange for the procedure. “We had people in line, man,” Mike says. “They’d each get four tattoos on their stomachs. They had to wear it for a month because it would let the skin heal up and then we’d get to practice, which we really needed.”
After roughly 18 months and 40 tattoos, the twosome developed a top-secret preservation method. In 2016, Save My Ink Forever officially started with a five-person team that included Mike, Kyle, a doctor, and others. However, there was no immediate boom for the business. The company finished 20 total tattoos in its first year, just seven more than what’s currently lying on an office table on a Tuesday night. Over time, the other team members left the project until Save My Ink Forever was left with just Mike and Kyle.
“Any new thing that you’re making where it’s even somewhat controversial to some people, it’s going to take a while to get some traction,” Mike says. “I said that it was going to hit, it’s just going to take time. Basically, we invested money in that and stuck it out and we’re starting to reap the benefits of it.”
Fortunately for the father-son team, the company attracted some notable attention in 2018. First, tattoo lifestyle magazine Inked shared a piece about the company. Eventually, BBC News and the official magazine for the National Funeral Directors Association picked up on the Sherwood's endeavors. Despite little advertising aside from the occasional Facebook ad, Save My Ink Forever found an audience for people who want to preserve their own or their loved ones’ tattoos.
Of course, that’s not to say there aren’t jobs they don’t take.
“Alright, this guy just got weirder,” Kyle says while peering down at his phone. It turns out the individual emailing Save My Ink Forever about a full body suit doesn’t want his tattoos flattened and framed like the typical customer. Instead, he wants his skin formed to a 3D dummy – a flesh mannequin, so to speak.
