Woman preserves late husband's tattooed skin and displays it in picture frame

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania - TikToker Angelica revealed in a recent post that while the ashes of her late husband never gave her closure, preserving his tattooed skin in a picture frame certainly did.

TikToker Angelica never got any closure from her late husband's ashes, so she preserved his tattooed skin in a picture frame. © Collage: Screenshots/Instagram/@realangelicavibes

Angelica revealed in a post on TikTok, where she goes as @realangelicavibes and has nearly 100,000 followers, that she preserved the skin of her husband after he died, tattoos and all.

"When my husband passed away unexpectedly, I knew that this was something that we were gonna do because we had talked about it," Angelica explained in the clip.

"So with his consent, when I was at the funeral home making all of the arrangements... I said I wanted to preserve my husband's tattoo," she said.

"Naturally, they thought I was crazy – they were very nice – but it was very unheard of, and they were unfamiliar with it, they were unsure how we were gonna do that."

To do so, Angelica got in contact with a company that preserves the tattoos of lost loved ones. She had them remove the tattoo in question, preserve it, and send it to her in a picture frame that she can hang on the wall.

The moment she received the tattoo is preserved in a TikTok video she posted, holding up the frame for all to see.

"The feeling of finally having him home with us is overwhelming! Words can't describe what having my husband’s tattoo as a work of art means to us," she captioned the post.

She explained later that bringing home her late husband's ashes "didn't bring me peace." Instead, preserving a piece of him and the body art that meant so much to him gave her that much-needed sense of closure.

"How does 250 lbs, muscles, and tattoos accumulate in a box?" Angelica asked, tearing up. "It doesn't... Having a piece of him that I can see, feel, and love is what we needed more than anything."