When Floris Hirschfeld's mother died two years ago, he had her portrait tattooed on his back to honor her memory. He hopes the image, skin and all, will be displayed on the wall of an art collector's home one day, Reuters reported.
His dream could soon be a reality as a Dutch entrepreneur has opened a tattoo shop in Amsterdam to remove and freeze the tattoos of dead people in hopes of preserving them as artwork.
"Everyone spends their lives in search of immortality and this is a simple way to get a piece of it," Peter van der Helm, the tattoo shop owner behind the concept, said in an interview. "Everybody with tattoos has that idea. It's not a new idea, we just found a way to actually do it."
Tucked away in a canal house in the Dutch capital, Hirschfeld and about 30 other clients of the "Walls and Skin" tattoo parlor have donated their skin to the company in a will. They have each paid a few hundred euros also.
When they die, a Dutch pathologist will remove the tattoo and freeze or package it in formaldehyde, ideally within 48 hours. It will then be sent to a laboratory outside the Netherlands, where a 12-week procedure extracts water and replaces it with silicone, leaving a rubbery substance, according to Reuters.
With no children or siblings of his own, Hirschfeld wants his tattoo to be saved even though he doesn't know who will inherit it.
"People have stuffed animals in their house, so why not skin?" Hirschfeld said. "If you look in certain old tattoo shops, there is always a jar with special water and a piece of skin in it and it does look terrible. This way it looks much better, so if I can be preserved like this, yes please!"
Tattoos cover Hirschfeld's body from neck down, Reuters reported.
"Some people are so important to me that I always want to carry them with me and this way I can," said Hirschfeld, whose mother died of cancer.
Skilful tattoo artists had been his main inspiration in coming up with the idea of preserving, Van der Helm said.
"Vincent van Gogh was a poor man when he died. You and me can't buy a Van Gogh," he said. "Tattooing is the people's form of art."
