Tok Museum Skins
If it seems radical to you sell a space in our skin so that they tattoo it with advertising brands, names o straight linesThen you will be speechless when I tell you that there are people who, directly, have sold their tattooed skin.
Throughout history there have been many people who have sold her tattooed skin either out of necessity or because they wanted their tattoo to go down in history.
Many Japanese once sold their full tattoos of Horimono to specialized institutions that, when they died, peeled off the skin of the corpse and preserved it in special oils to prevent it from deteriorating and then sold it to private collectors and museums.
Doctor Fukushi Museum
Tattooed skins in perfect condition
The most important collection was that of the Doctor Fukushi Museum, inaugurated in 1926 by a renowned pathologist who became interested in tattoos as he discovered that the ink on the skin helped him detect certain diseases.
He became obsessed with the subject and ended up looking for a method to preserve human skins and managed to develop a formula to preserve in perfect condition the skins of people from whom he had bought them in life.
He cataloged throughout his life more than 2.000 drawingsalong with detailed information on the "owners" of the tattoos and their skin, and took more than 3.000 photos. His son Katsunari Fukushi continued with that hobby, which is curious considering that neither of them ever got tattoos.
It gives a bit of grima, the truth
Unfortunately, most of the documentation was destroyed in 1945 during the bombing of Tokyo in World War II, which left the university buildings in ruins. However, the skin samples were stored elsewhere and are now kept just over a hundred in the University of Tokyo University of Pathology.
Another day I will talk to you in detail about the tattooed skin collections that is out there: the truth is that it is even scary.