It is worth a lengthy, yet brief, digression on this point. As far as a dark place is concerned. The issues associated with books bound with human skin are many. And one of these is the identity of the person whose skin was used in the binding. One key source human skin-books is that involving executed criminals. This was particuarly true of the late 19th century and early 20th centuries. Under the laws of certain European countries, it was specified that the corpses of such persons were to be turned over to the medical professionals for research purposes. This usually involved interest in skulls, brains, skeletons, muscles, organs, etc. But there was more than just a scientific medical element involved. In Medieval England, high treason was punishable by the dreadful death of being drawn, hanged, and quartered. Quartering was the cutting of the body of the traitor into four pieces. Then the pieces were sent to different parts of the kingdom…north, south, east, and west, whereas sometimes, the four parts of the body, along with the head were placed on spikes. In England, this was done after death, whereas in France it was done by four horses while the condemned was still alive. But in England, the act of quartering after death represented the highest act of desecration of the body of the condemned. This fate befell many men over the centuries, most notably two medieval saints…

…Oliver Plunkett (left) and Cuthbert Mayne (right).

Meet…

…Mary Bateman, also known as the Yorkshire Witch. And what things she got up to! Burglary, robbery, witchery, begging for money to help others, then pocketing the donations for herself, fortune-telling, abortion, poisoning, jailbreaks, and the like. Mary was a very busy gal! She was also a very imaginative con-artist. She announced that she had a magic hen whose eggs had the pronouncement…Christ is coming…magically imprinted upon them. Then she charged people to see them…

It turned out that Mary would write the slogan on the eggs, and then stick them back into the hen, who would then lay the eggs a second time, with the message imprinted upon them. It seems that religion and nuttiness go hand-in-hand. Bateman was a follower of a schizophrenic woman named…

…Joanna Southcott, a self-declared prophet who heard voices, and, naturally enough, founded a cult. And yet more recycling…Joanna declared, at the age 64, that she was pregnant with God’s son, referring by the name…Shiloh. And of course, or so Joanna declared, she was a virgin. So yet another virgin birth, though this one isn’t even clever. She left behind a box full of stuff. From the attic? A box filled with magical easter eggs? No…her prophecies. And it was not to be opened until some vague time of divine devastation. You could, of course, buy your way into Heaven by buying a paper seal from her.

And there it is waiting to be opened. And thus the little ditty…

 War, disease, crime and banditry, distress of nations and perplexity will increase until the Bishops open Joanna Southcott's box.

Oh, Joanna wasn’t pregnant, and didn’t give birth to Shiloh or any other child. But as with all nutty cults, that didn’t matter. In 1808, a woman named Rebecca Perigo put herself under Mary Bateman’s care, if you call it that. Unbeknownst to Rebecca, Mary was poisoning the woman’s pudding, and eventually, Rebecca died. Mary was arrested, tried, and executed for the murder in 1809. Her body parts were in high demand, and used to make horrible things, such as a…

…disgusting folding drinking-cup…have a drink on me! Well, Mary’s buying. As was common, the medical profession saw the need to keep her…

…skull, death mask, and the rest of her skeleton, seemingly in an apparent…Hello! pose. But more important here is that her skin was used to bind two books…

… The Hurt of Sedition, by John Cheeke. Also…

…Arcadian Princess by Richard Braithwaite. This is also as strange as it is morbid. Why? Because no such claims were made about…

…books written about Mary Bateman herself.  And as far as the use of human skin to bind books…here we go! Let’s begin with a discussion the saga of…

…William Corder and his girlfriend Maria Marten. Having found themselves in a sexual relationship, Corder feared that he would have illegitimate children by her. So in 1827, Corder lured Maria into the Red Barn with promises of eloping. He even told Maria to dress like a man, no doubt because he wouldn’t be seen with her. So he shot her, and put her body in a barrel. Maria’s father found the body on April 19, 1828, and it was supposedly Maria’s ghost that showed him where to look. A crowd of over 7,000 gathered to watch the execution of Corder…

Well, he had it coming. Corder’s body was dissected, which people paid good money to watch. All manner of bric-a-brac associated with Corder’s body survived, including…

…his skeleton, a not-very-well-done bust, and the killer’s scalp complete with the remnants of an ear. But there is more…

… a replica death mask, Corder’s pistols, and a rare Staffordshire pottery replica of the barn. But the best part is…

A book was produced which detailed the murder and legal proceedings. And yes…it is bound with the skin of William Corder. It is the actual book shown here. Then there was the case of the…

…Gunpower Plot of 1605, which included the ever-popular Guy Fawkes. The plan was to assassinate King James I. The plotters planned to blow up the House of Lords while the king was present as part of the State Opening of Parliament. James I, whose religious agenda, despite being baptized Roman Catholic, was protestant. English Catholics hoped that James would end the suppression that was part of the Elizabethan program, and implement a policy of tolerance. This didn’t happen, so a group of Catholics decided to kill King James, and place his daughter Elizabeth on the throne, hoping for a Catholic monarch. The plot was betrayed to the government, and following a security sweep of the House of Lords, Fawkes was caught with 36 barrels of gunpowder. But other men were named as fellow conspirators, including…

…the Reverend Henry Garnet, a Jesuit priest. As a conspirator, he too was executed. But!

A famous book about the plot and how the perpetrators met their fate was written…A True and Perfect Relation (actual book shown). Of course, what makes the book so interesting is that…

…it is not only bound with the skin of Poor Henry Garnet, but if you stare at the cover long enough, you just might make out the Reverend’s face. There was also the infamous French murderer… Michael Campi. This wasn’t his real name…he refused to give his real name. But you don’t need to know a murderer’s real name to execute him. Campi attacked a retired lawyer and his sister, but whereas the sister survived, her elderly brother wasn’t so lucky. The murderer was…

…taken to the guillotine and executed in 1884. A man named Flandinette from the Ecole d’Anthropologie was supposed to take skin from Campi’s right side and arm, tan it, and use it to bind a book detailing the events. The Pitt Rivers Museum purchased, in 1889, a…

…piece of Campi’s skin that had been carried around by a French policeman in Paris. It is not known whether the book was ever written, and if it was, there is no record of what happened to it. But losing a little skin was nothing compared with what is told about his post-guillotine existence.

Society’s fascination with severed heads is ancient. Some of the most valued Christian relics are heads and skulls. The cephalophore, a topic I’ve discussed many times before, sometimes involves a severed head that is animated enough that it can speak. The re-animated human head is firmly on the list of horror movies and the X-files as a go-to story element. However, real life is, as it usually is, a bit more gruesome than any horror movie. And so it was for the hapless murderer bearing the pseudonym…Michael Campi. Enter…

…Jean Baptiste-Vincent Laborde, a physician and physiologist…not to mention somewhat of a ghoul. And he is no doubt a mirror image of…

…Dr. Victor Frankenstein, a man who brought the dead back to life in a most disturbing way. I think Old Vic would have liked Dr. Labourde. Following the decapitation of Campi, the ghoulish Dr. Labourde took possession of the dead man’s head. And he had a singular purpose in mind…placing the head on his experimental table in an upright position, the learned professor of physiologiy connected its cold, lifeless carotid artery, by means of a tube, to the warm and throbbing corresponding artery in the neck of a living dog. When the warm blood reached the head of Campi, the dead man’s checks became rosy again. Campi’s eyelids moved, and his eyes opened. And so it was that Campi suffered far more than just the guillotine’s blade. It is unclear whether the book bound in the skin of a murderer who survived being decapitated for a few moments was actually written, and, if so, what became of it.

Surely only such things happened in Europe. Well, no. In fact, Campi’s situation was preceded in time by a case that occurred in New Jersey. Campi was executed in 1884. In 1833, the Sayre family, Judge Samuel Sayre, Sarah Sayre, and their domestic servant Phoebe, were all brutally murdered on their farm. It didn’t long to figure out who did it…

Antoine La Blanc was a French immigrant who found work on the Sayre’s family farm. He wasn’t paid. No. In exchange for his labor, he was allowed to sleep in the basement. With no pay, anger turned into rage, and rage turned into murder. And he wasn’t hard to find, seeing how he was in a pub getting drunk with Judge Sayer’s valuables sitting next to him on the bar. Like another English criminal who will appear shortly, Le Blanc was executed by a new way of hanging people…

…so no more sharp drop and a sudden stop. The new method was to put the noose around the neck of the condemned man, which was attached to a very heavy weight. Instead of a trapdoor opening and letting the body drop straight down, you dropped the weight, which then yanked the man being executed straight up into the air. Witnesses estimated that it took Le Blanc two minutes to die. Once he had gone to meet his Maker, his body was dissected. Dr. Joseph Henry jolted Le Blanc’s head with electricity from a battery. Supposedly, Le Blanc’s limbs began to twitch. Ah, yes…and his eyes rolled back into their sockets, and then Le Blanc…smiled. Like Corder, a…

…death mask and book were produced. However, unlike Corder, and apparently Campi, no book about the trial was said to have been bound using his skin. Like Corder and a soon-to-be-met English criminal, his body was flayed, and his skin used to make all sorts of souvenirs, especially…

…wallets. But, and this will be important later when Buchenwald is discussed, Le Blanc’s skin was also used to make…lampshades. Yes, Americans used the skin of an executed criminal to make lampshades.

Ah! Criminals with skin in the game don’t stop there! Meet…

John Horwood, or, as Darla likes to call him…John Horrorwood, was an unemployed, violent thug and demented stalker. Rejected by Eliza Balsum, he continually harrased her. One day when she was out walking, Horrible Horwood picked up a rock and hurled it at her, hitting her in the head. How she actually died is uncertain. Her friends rendered first aid, which seemed to help. But she soon grew worse. It has been suggested that Eliza died as a result of faulty first aid. However, a doctor decided that she needed to undergo…

…Trepanation…something you need like a hole in the head. Tepanation is a primitive procedure wherby someone bores a hole in a person’s skull to uncover a bit of the brain. The procedure was used as late as the Civil War by Dr. William Hammond, and it has held a fascination to this day…

And it would seem that English Football Hooligans believed that the procedure could be carried out using…

…darts. It has taken all of might to avoid digressing into a digression in the middle of a digression and sound off on football hooligans, although Darla is taking lessons. In America, we do it bigger…bigger is better! And so there was a time when an awesome lawn game became popular…

…and thus did Javeline Darts become…Jarts, which is cool because it rhymes with one of Darla’s favorite words. Now things get banned in the U.S. these days rather easily, depending on the mood that puritanical religious fanatics find themselves in. But who would have known that giving kids large, heavily-weighted missles with sharp metals tips could turn out badly? But they did manage to get banned during an era that had far less banning going on.

And I’m sure that if was with some trepidation that trepanation was performed on Eliza Balsum because of her head injury…Jarts hadn’t been invented yet. It’s been suggested that the procedure wasn’t done correctly, or that secondary infection occurred. Horwood was tried, convicted, executed and given over for dissection. And like his predecessors, his body became something of great appeal…

…his skeleton was hung in a cabinet as if it were waiting for some Trick-Or-Treaters to jump out at them. Trick! You wanted a treat instead? Have a Jart. You’re just in time for the Horwood Horror Show. Step right up! You might say that Horwood had a skeleton in his closet. There was also…

…a piece of his skin, which included the inscription…Tanned skin of John Horwood, executed at Bristol on April 13, 1821 for the murder of Eliza Balsum. And here we go! The notes of the trial were recorded and turned into a book…

…made of Horwood’s skin (actual book shown). And it came with a cool gallows on the front cover!

However, a Mr. John C Langdon, who will appear again later, shared some additional details. First, Marie lived for six months after the rock-throwing incident. In his opinion, that precluded a charge of murder. But he also shared some information that might cause a shiver to run up one’s spine…no pun intended. According to Mr. Langdon, John Horwood was unlucky enough to be the subject of an experiment in execution. Specifically, a new way of hanging people had been developed, called the…New Drop. I suppose the New Drop was as successful as the Old Drop, since the subject of the experiment died in a manner we would expect. Langdon went on to state that the charge of murder was unpopular with the local people, despite the character of John Horwood.

How about…

…William Hare, William Burke, and Dr. Robert Knox? Knox specialized in anatomy. That meant getting bodies, and he was not disinclined to take bodies from body snatchers. Now you can dig up bodies from cemeteries and sell them to Dr. Knox. But there is another way, and Burke and Hare knew exactly what that was…go around murdering people, and sell the fresh cadavers to Dr. Knox. During 1828, Burke and Hare murdered sixteen people in Edinburgh and sold the bodies to Dr. Knox. And what happened next is probably to be expected. Burke was hanged, whereas Hare was released from prison. And Burke became of considerable interest…

…a bust, a piece of his brain, which he probably should have used a little more often, his skeleton hanging from a hook on public display, and an endocranial cast taken from his head…what goes around comes around. Burke’s head? Well, an endocranial cast and a chunk of brain weren’t the only thing that came from Burke’s head…

…This is written with the blood of William Burke, who was hanged at Edinburgh on January 28, 1829 for the murder of Mrs. Campbell of Docherty. The blood was taken from his head on the first day of February 1829.

Yes! Written in blood. It would have been a lot easier if they had Jarts in those days. To make a stranger situation even stranger, in 1838, two boys found something rather disturbing hidden in a local park…

…seventeen little dolls four inches tall, each with its own coffin. Yes, I can count…the picture shows only seven. The entire collection was originally owned by a private collector, who sold eight of them to the National Museum of Scotland. The other nine have disappeared. Many link the Coffin Dolls to Burke and Hare, although this has never been proven, and the makers of the dolls and the purpose of the maker’s making them…remains a mystery. But! Let’s not be finished with Poor Sliced-and-Diced William Burke just yet. Let’s…

…use his skin to make a wallet, not to mention Burke’s Skin Pocketbook (actual book shown), complete with a pen.

Did I say pocketbook? I can’t remember, so I’ll say it again. Right! Pocketbooks can be very strange. In England in 1895, a woman doing some cleaning up…Caroline Egerton to be precise, found something rather macabre in a hidden spot behind the doors of her mother’s bookcase. It was a small pocketbook with a letter inside…

I have only this morning discovered the long lost pocketbook made out of the skin of the man who shot your father!

That was shocking to be sure. The book was bound using…

…the tattooed skin of a man. Eventually the skin came off, and was preserved in oil in a medicine container. And yes…always clean your fingernails. So who was this man who did the shooting? Where did the skin come from?

It came from the back of a man who was executed after he tried to shoot a British major in the first Chinese Opium War in 1839.

Yes, it took Britain’s flooding China with highly addictive…

…Opium to produce another pocketbook bound in human skin. Of course, now, Afghanistan is flooding the west with the products of the opium poppy. So much for chasing the dragon.

Never let it be said that James Allen is far from my mind…if I could just remember what he looked like. He was a convicted thief who used a broad array of aliases, and some false names too, though…George Walton…was perhaps his most famous. He was a career criminal who spent his life in and out of prison. Finally, he was sentenced to life in the Massachusetts State Prison. He had, of course, denied his guilt…until he found out he was dying. And many people who have done terrible things, who initially deny that they did them, are suddenly concerned with forgiveness as the coffin draws near enough for them to smell the pine. And so too George Walton - James Allen. He made a deathbed confession in 1837. The confession was written down in a 40 page booklet…

This book is bound in the skin of Walton…in Latin, or course. This is the actual book. Legend holds that James Allen requested his confession be bound in his own skin and given to John A Fenno Jr, who was a victim of Walton. Then Fenno’s daughter gave the book to the Boston Athenaeum, where it remains to this day.

On October 20, 1829, Grace Cudmore died after a short illness. She suffered serious symptoms including headaches, stomach pain, nausea, and her teeth became loose. Then she died. Grace confided in a friend, stating that she believed her husband George was poisoning her. It proved to be the case that Grace and George were estranged, and a lodger who recently moved in with the couple, Sarah Dunn, became George’s mistress. George wasn’t very smart. An autopsy indicated the presence of arsenic, and police found a wrapper marked…poison…in the house. It turned out that he had poisoned her roasted apple. Pudding? Roasted apples? I recommend you stay away from dessert. Well, Eve’s apple had some negative consequences too. Sarah was acquitted, but George was sentenced to be hanged. Following his execution, his body was turned over for dissection. In the course of dissection, skin was taken from his body and used to bind a book. But…a book about his crime, trial, and execution? No, a strange thing happened…

George Cudmore’s skin was used as a cover for The Poetical Works of John Milton, published in 1852 (actual book shown). The book included a note stating…

Bound in the skin of George Cudmore, hanged for murder, 1830.

It seems somewhat odd that it took 22 years to make good use of Cudmore’s hide. And there is one case that has a slight twist.

“As I am going to meet my God, I do declare that I never shed the blood of Charles Stewart nor that of any human creature, nor had I ever such intention, nor did ever such an idea enter my mind, as I always had the greatest abhorrence of murder… I deny the whole thing……but I forgive all from my heart, and hope God will forgive them.

Those were the last words of Irishman Charles Smith. Having spoken them proudly, he was then hanged by the neck after being found guilty of the murder of Charles Stewart. Smith worked at a Pottery works. On the night of December 4, 1816, two burglars broke into the office to rob the place. Charles Stewart was on guard that night, and the two robbers attacked him, leaving him with injuries so severe that he would later die of them. Stewart identified Charles Smith as one of the attackers. The problem was, he could only identify Smith by the sound of his voice…and that was the case against him…the guy who attacked me sounded like Charles Smith. Following his audacious assertion of innocence, he was soon dead. And yes, yet again, someone decided to write an account of the matter, and this required skin from the convict’s body. The owner of a bookshop who collected coins and rare books, John Bell, decided to make a particularly rare book…an account of the final fate of Charles Smith. And, as Smith’s body was being dissected, John Bell obtained a piece of the dead man’s skin…

And there it is! And it’s a pretty big piece at that. However, Bell opted not to bound the book in this piece of skin. But he came pretty close and, perhaps, he did the next best thing…

…oh, Bell wrote his account of the unjust injustice, to coin a phrase, received by the Irishman convicted on the basis of a claim that should never have been entered into evidence. But that piece of skin couldn’t be wasted, so it is tucked neatly into Bell’s book.

Some people do like to gloat! At least that was the case on May 1, 1820…

On that day, five men were executed in London. They were members of a terrorist group known as the Spencean Philanthropists. They were, obviously, political activities who fully endorsed violence to change the political milieu of Great Britain. Their leader was…

…Arthur Thistlewood, somewhat of a rogue. He and his cronies were behind the Cato Street Conspiracy, a plot to kill a bunch of British cabinet ministers in just one go. The problem? It was a police sting organized by an informer.  And several men were hanged as a result, including Thistlewood, who was also beheaded after his death. But what do we know about dissected criminals? Yes, of course! Supposedly…

…a book about Thistlewood’s trial was bound in his own skin, perhaps a version of one of the books shown above.

Brief mention should be made of Paul Verlaine’s greatest book of poems called…

…Chair, the French word for…Flesh. It has been claimed that a copy of this book had two pieces of tattooed flesh attached to it…

A copy of Verlaine's flesh (1896), a triumphant phallophore, bears the protective emblem that the ancient Romans erected on the facades of their homes, while a heart pierced with a sword painfully hides its wound underneath.

There are illustrations in the book that suggest, as it concerns a phallus, something similar…

As for the figure on the left, I don’t have any suggestions, other than to note that the position of the tail reminds one of Pazuzu. The illustration in the middle would seem to be Panpipes, and Pan was intimately associated with the phallus. There is clearly a triumphant phallaphore standing in the middle of the phallus shown on the right. She is holding a plant in each hand, and it is possible that the one of plant she holds in her hand is meant to be a laurel branch. Still, these aren’t pieces of tattooed skin. But we’re not done with Verlaine yet. He also wrote a book called…

…Femmes…Women, which you might think is a tad bit on the erotic side…

Perhaps, and I wonder what Mathilde Verlaine, shown on the far right, would think of all this. But there may have been a strange edition of this floating around…

More reserved are the decors of Women…a partially obliterated musketeer and a sort of bare heraldic shield, an immaculate ivory waiting table, although something virginal seems unforeseen in the circumstances.

However, a similar thing is said about Jules Claretie’s…

…Le Drapeau…The Flag. One source states that there was what appears to be a tattoo stamped on the book, or an attached piece of skin with the tattoo…

…under a pike and a crisscrossed flag, stamped with a girl's head in profile with hair and a generous chignon.

There is one last tattoo skin-book worthy of note, though it leads to some pretty dark places…

…the infamous Rambert – Mailly murders. On October 22, 1930, two thugs and life-long losers, Louis-Marius Rambert and Gustave Mailly, broke into the Bergeron home in Ecully, France. What was at first meant to be a burglary, ended up being a double homicide. Both were tried, convicted and sentenced to death. Not nearly as much is known about Mailly, although he apparently became ill…

…sorry about some of the pictures…good ones are hard to find. Rambert’s sentence was commuted to life in prison. And an odd set of circumstances leads to a bizarre conclusion. Rambert came to know Dr. Jean Lacassagne, an expert in forensic medicine and researcher of criminality and tattoos. Lacassagne believed that tattoos were a criminal code, and study of them could lead to greater understanding of the criminal mind. For Lacassagne, tattoos of any kind were an objective sign of the delinquent tendency. Eventually, as the story goes, Lacassagne became less absorbed by the “codes” of criminality, and more obsessed with tattoos in general. Now I will show the Buchenwald Concentration Camp Table of Artifacts…

…I have discussed the two shrunken heads in a previous essay. But we can clearly see pieces of human skin with tattoos. The skin-tattoos were collected by SS Dr. Erich Wagner, who was at Buchenwald in order to write his dissertation about the connection between tattoos and criminality. He no doubt chose Buchenwald because it housed a large number of common criminals. Wagner is contemporary with Lacassgne of France. To show the Buchenwald photo again…

…the item which the arrow is pointing is almost impossible to see. What is it? I know…

Dr. Wagner’s…A Study of Tattooing. This dissertation is the only surviving item of the those seen on the Buchenwald Table…all  the rest conveniently disappeared. Erich Wagner was an SS-Untersturmfuhrer, a rank equivalent to Lieutenant in the Wehrmacht, or 2nd lieutenant in the US and British armies. His dissertation was well-received, and in September 1941, he officially became a Doctor of Medicine. He later joined the Waffen-SS. He was a POW until his escape in 1948. In 1958, Wagner was arrested, and committed suicide by slitting his wrists before going to trial on charges of murder. Here’s another shot of tattoos from Buchenwald…

So Wagner had something in common with Lacassagne? Yes. But in another way as well…

On January 25, 1934, Rambert died of tuberculosis. But he specifically requested that Lacassagne, who was writing a book about the murders, use his skin to bind the book, and included pieces of skin with his own tattoos. I take no position on Dr. Erich Wagner and Dr. Lacassagne. But I must say that the situation may be somewhat disturbing for many people…so continue at your own risk. Wagner’s tattoos included these…

And some of his tattoos look a lot like…

…acid blotter. There were also tattoos that were planted in Ilse Koch’s house…

The Buchanwald tattoos are crude because they’re “jail house” tattoos. But, as it turns out, the practice of collecting human skin to preserve tattoos is more pervasive than one might think. Buchenwald was in Poland, and collections of Polish prisoners’ tattoos have been collected…

…on display in Romania…

…examples currently held in Museum do Design e da Moda, Lisbon…

…don’t forget Australia…

Moving westward…Surgeons Hall Museum, in Edinburgh, Scotland…

Then! Driving south, we arrive at the Science Museum of London…

…the Science Museum of London has over 300 pieces of dead-skin tattoos. The UCL Pathology Collection has a very strange piece of tattooed skin…

The symbol of the phallus is well-attested…

Or at least, alluded to…

Trick or Treat…gals! Tongue-in-Cheek agricultural humor…a little pictorial double-entrende…

Coincidence is a very strange thing…even in agriculture. I’ll show the flying phallus tattoo again, and what may be its source…

The image on the right I found in a medieval illustrated manuscript.

But what about America? Surely such awful, ghoulish, morbid things like human skin cut from a corpse in order to display the tattoos can’t be found in the Land of Great Hypocrisy. Actually…it gets a bit worse…

This is a British soldier and generally gruesome guy named Horatio Gordon Robley. One of his favorite things to study was…tattoos. But not just any tattoos. No phallus images here! The Maori people of New Zealand were known for elaborate, facial and head tattooing. As the images show, Robley decided that the best way to preserve Maori tattooing was to simply keep the decapitated heads, which became known as Mokomokai…

Morbid? Macabre? So what is all this about America? Oh, yes…I remember. Well, Robley’s Ghastly Collection eventually went up for sale. Who bought it?

…the American Museum of Natural History. It would be strange if they bought them with a certain type of American currency…

Yikes! What happened at the US mint in 1857 and 1858?

To conclude my brief look at the confusing world of tattoos, I will show my favorite tattoo, though don’t get the wrong idea…

Ah, yes…everyone likes a big hug, so too a phallus, something that resonates to this very day…

Surely all this about tattoos cut off the body of someone is in the past where it belongs. Not quite…

Save My Ink Forever is a service that arranges for your loved one’s tattoos to be removed, along with the skin, then preserved, and given to you. This is, of course, a lasting souvenir of the one you love. But it would seem that an even better, and longer lasting, memory of someone is to turn them into a book. I touched on that above, but will now, in Section 3…Only Skin Deep, I will finish the tale of humanity’s strange obsession with skin.