TikToker Angelica has kept an unusual memento of her late husband.
“My husband was the biggest Steelers fan. How big? We preserved his real tattoo — his actual skin,” Angelica wrote via TikTok on July 23, posting pics of herself and her son holding up a framed piece of his body art: a skull inked with the Pittsburgh football team’s logo. “Our son chose this one. Out of 70+, he said ‘This is the one Dad would want.’”
Angelica added, “This isn’t a replica. You can see his hair, his wrinkles, the ink I kissed goodnight.”
She tagged Save My Ink Forever, claiming it’s “the only company in the world that can do this.”
Three days later, Angelica posted another video about her spouse’s skin art.
“Yeah, we really had my husband’s tattoo preserved,” she told her followers. “And, no, my son and I don’t think it’s weird at all.”
She continued, “Let me tell you how we had it done. When my husband passed away unexpectedly, I knew that this is something we were going to do because we had talked about it. So with this consent, when I was at the funeral home making all the arrangements — for those of you unfortunately who have gone through this process, it’s everything from how you want the chairs to what kind of flowers do you want, all of that stuff, right? And I said, ‘I want to preserve my husband’s tattoo.’ Naturally, they thought I was crazy. They were very nice, but it was very unheard-of. They were not familiar with it. They weren’t sure how we were going to do that.”
After informing the funeral director of her plans, Angelica connected with Save My Ink Forever, which then began communicating with the funeral home. The mortician there removed “the tissue” that she and her son desired to keep.
“My husband passed away on a Friday,” she recalled. “His showing was the following Thursday and the funeral was Friday. On Friday, after everybody left and I was doing my goodbyes,” she met with the mortician and outlined “the exact tattoo I wanted.”
The preservation “took about 90 days and we had set it up and arranged that they were going to deliver him, bring him up to us. I’m in West Virginia, the company is in Ohio. When they showed us his tattoo, it was un-describable as to what that felt. It wasn’t just one feeling. It wasn’t just an emotion. It was physical. It’s in a frame, you don’t touch it. But it filled a void that was so big.”
Angelica said she could not imagine declining to memorialize her spouse in this way.
“I have many, many emotions every day,” she said. “Every second. And this helps me in ways that I didn’t know that I needed.”
Crying, she continued, “These are all happy tears, but please, please help people know that this is available.”
Angelica urged her followers to start making plans for how they wish to be honored. “Start treating this like you want to be in control of everything,” she said.
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