---
title: "Our Inks"
id: "1860"
type: "page"
slug: "our-inks"
published_at: "2021-02-16T13:15:46+00:00"
modified_at: "2026-06-03T08:41:16+00:00"
url: "https://testsite1.vip/our-inks/"
markdown_url: "https://testsite1.vip/our-inks.md"
excerpt: "Our Tattoo Inks The science behind why our ashes-infused tattoo ink is built specifically for the job, not..."
---

# Our Tattoo Inks

### The science behind why our ashes-infused tattoo ink is built specifically for the job, not bought off a shelf.

## Our Tattoo Inks: Built From Scratch For Ashes Tattoos

We get asked all the time which “brand” of tattoo ink we mix the ashes with. The honest answer is we don’t use a brand at all, we make our own tattoo inks from the ground up. This page walks you through why that matters, in plain English with a bit of the technical side where it helps, so you can see exactly what your loved one’s ashes are going into.

![all cremation tattoo ink - cremation ink](https://testsite1.vip/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/all-cremation-tattoo-ink.jpg)

### Why We Make Our Own Inks

We get clients asking us, fairly often, which brand of tattoo ink we mix the ashes with. The honest answer is none of them. We always make our own.

There’s a long list of reasons, and we’ll go through them properly in this article. It’s a bit of a longer read than some of the other pages on the site, but at the end of it you’ll be clued up on most things we do at [Cremation Ink ®](https://cremationink.com/)
, and hopefully it answers a lot of the questions you might have been carrying.

The short version is that off-the-shelf tattoo ink isn’t built to hold ashes. It’s built to hold pigment, and it’s been engineered to do that one job. The moment you ask it to carry a second, different substance with different molecular properties (cremation ashes), it stops behaving the way good ink should. So we built our own from the ground up, with the ashes side accounted for from the very first ingredient.

![Ashes into tattoo ink safe](https://testsite1.vip/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Ashes-into-tattoo-ink-safe-1.jpeg)

### Why A Studio Just Tipping Ashes Into Ink Doesn’t Work

This page doesn’t cover the health and safety side, since that’s well covered across other articles on the site, including [is ashes in tattoo ink safe](https://cremationink.com/tattoo-ink-with-ashes/ashes-into-tattoo-ink-safe/)
. This page covers the simple, logical reason why a local tattoo studio tipping ashes into their ink pot at the appointment doesn’t really produce an ashes tattoo at all.

Picture a pot of water. If you drop a small amount of ashes into it, some of them float for a second or two, the rest sink to the bottom. Within two minutes, none of them are still suspended in the body of the water. That’s basic logic.

Now picture a slightly more resistant liquid, say tattoo ink. The same thing happens. The ashes might take a little longer to fall, but they fall. The only way to keep the ashes suspended evenly through the ink, rather than settling at the bottom, is if the ashes’ particle size matches the pigment’s particle size at a molecular level. That’s what’s called molecular symmetry, and it’s what we do at Cremation Ink ®. The ashes don’t sink, don’t float, they sit *inside* the pigment suspension as part of it.

If you don’t have that match, you have ashes at the bottom of the pot.

![tattoo with cremation ashes uk](https://testsite1.vip/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/tattoo-with-cremation-ashes-uk.jpg)

### The Pot, The Needle And Why The Ashes Never Make It In

Now picture the same pot in a tattoo studio. The artist tips the ashes in, gives it a quick stir, and tells you everything is mixed. What you now know is the ashes are at the bottom. Stirring just flicks them around the sides of the bottom. They settle again within seconds.

Here’s what professional tattooists do, 99% of the time. We feed the needles with ink from the centre of the pot. We avoid the bottom of the pot like the plague.

Why? Two reasons. First, if the machine is running and you dip a needle into the side of the pot, you can flick the entire pot over the client. Centre dipping is just safer habit. Second, and more important, the bottom of the pot is where you grind your needle tips. If the machine is running and you touch the bottom, you’ll grind tiny hooks onto the points of the needles. Those hooks then drag the ink and blood back out of the skin during the rest of the tattoo, causing constant bleeding and pushing the impregnated ink straight back out as you go. Any professional tattooist will tell you that’s a full strip down and a fresh set of needles. So we avoid the bottom of the pot full stop.

Even if you tried to deliberately dip into the bottom without the machine running, the needles in any modern tattoo machine sit roughly 3 to 4mm behind the end of the tube tip. So even if you pressed the tip flat against the bottom, the needles wouldn’t pick up any of what’s down there.

The result: in a “studio mixing ashes in ink” job, your loved one’s ashes are sitting at the bottom of the pot, and the tattoo artist physically can’t get to them.

![tattoos with human ashes](https://testsite1.vip/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/tattoos-with-human-ashes.jpeg)

### Why Tattooists Shave The Skin And Avoid Stray Particles

If you needed one more piece of evidence, here’s another. We shave the skin before tattooing, for two reasons. First, hygiene. Second, to stop hairs blowing up into the needle configuration during lining.

If you’ve got, say, three needles set in a triangle for fine lining, and a hair gets caught between two of them, you get what tattooists call tramlining. A gap appears in the density of the line where the needles can’t deposit ink evenly. The client may not notice it on the day, but a seasoned tattooist can see it from across the room. Over time, that section heals with a dull, uneven line.

The same thing happens with any larger particle that gets into the needle setup. Including coarse, unprepared ashes that haven’t been reduced to pigment size. They cause exactly the same tramlining effect. So when a local studio has tipped raw ashes into an ink pot, and somehow a particle does make it into the needle group, the line that gets laid down comes out broken and dull anyway.

At Cremation Ink ®, every one of these issues is dealt with at the lab stage by particle-matching both the ashes and the pigment to create one true suspension. That’s how you get a real ashes tattoo.

![commemorative ashes ink](https://testsite1.vip/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/commemorative-ashes-ink-1.jpg)

### Our Pigment

We use the best pigment available, and we always have done. We work with organic pigments that have been the backbone of tattooing inks for the last forty years, and we work only with suppliers who give us full traceability, manufacturing batch data, safety data sheets and heavy metal technical sheets.

There’s an honest divide in the industry. Of the hundreds of tattoo ink companies in the world, only around twenty supply full safety data sheets. Even fewer supply heavy metal technical sheets. Ours come with both. The difference matters because cheaper pigments often save money by skipping that paperwork, and the missing paperwork is usually missing for a reason.

We won’t name names, but a lot of mass-produced ink uses cheaper pigment to improve profit margins. The pigment quality is what your tattoo is built from, so we don’t compromise on it.

![black cremation tattoo ink](https://testsite1.vip/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/black-cremation-tattoo-ink.jpg)

### Viscosity, Or Why The Ink Has To Be Built Around The Ashes

You might wonder why we can’t just pour ashes into any tattoo ink and call it a day. Here’s why.

Adding anything to a liquid changes its viscosity, in other words, it makes it thicker. For a tattoo ink to perform across lining, shading and packing, the ink itself needs a very specific low viscosity. So we make our base ink slightly *too* fluid to tattoo with on its own. When the ashes are then added, in a precise, measured amount, the viscosity rises to exactly the right level for your tattooist to work with it.

Think corn flour and water. The more corn flour you add, the thicker the water becomes, until you end up with a mud-like paste. This is exactly why our recipes specify set amounts of every ingredient down to fine tolerances, including the amount of ashes we add. So we can always send your tattooist a workable, professional ink with perfect viscosity and optimal suspension of both ashes and pigment.

That’s a fundamental difference between us and anyone trying to do this on the day at a studio. They’re starting with ink built for pigment only, then dropping in something it isn’t designed to hold. We’re starting with ink built specifically to hold ashes, so it works the way it should.

![why cremation ink](https://testsite1.vip/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/why-cremation-ink.jpg)

### Natural Ingredients

We use only natural ingredients in our inks, and we have done for many years. In our [online shop](https://cremationink.com/shop/)
, every ink has the data showing all of its components, excluding the ashes themselves. Full transparency, nothing hidden.

### How We Keep Tattoos Bright Long Term

This is where it gets a bit technical, but bear with us. We’re passionate about this because it’s one of the biggest things that separates a tattoo that ages well from one that doesn’t.

When your skin is tattooed, you’ve put a foreign substance into it. The body’s response is to protect itself. Your white blood cells and macrophages race to the area to deal with the damage. If they find something they recognise as inert and safe, they encapsulate it, surround it in a protective shell, and signal to the rest of the immune system that everything is fine. The pigment stays in place, and that’s the colour you see in your healed tattoo.

If they find something they *don’t* like, they try to push it out of the skin. That’s where the problems with raw-ashes tattoos come from, the body treating the contaminated ashes as a threat and rejecting them.

On a wider scale, encapsulation is also why heavy black tattoos heal with a slightly grey appearance. The protective shell adds a thin layer over the pigment that softens the visible colour.

![cremations ash tattoo](https://testsite1.vip/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/cremations-ash-tattoo.jpg)

### Encapsulation And Why Tattoos Fade

Here’s the part most clients have never been told. The encapsulation around your pigment is not permanent. UV rays from the sun gradually fracture the protective shells. When that happens, your white blood cells and macrophages turn up again to clean up any pigment fragments that have broken free, and they re-encapsulate the remaining pigment.

Every time that cycle repeats, a tiny amount of pigment is lost, and the encapsulating layers thicken. Over years, that’s what causes tattoo fade. It’s not the pigment “running out,” it’s the immune system gradually thinning it through repeated repair cycles.

That’s why every good tattooist tells you to keep your tattoo out of direct sun. UV is the main driver of the cycle.

Ink manufacturers have tried lots of techniques over the years to reduce encapsulation. Some used to add PVA glue (yes, really) as an additive. More recent attempts have used chemical compounds that turned out to be a serious health risk, which is why they didn’t last.

Why do manufacturers keep reaching for shortcuts? Time and money. It takes considerable time to formulate ink the scientific way, keeping the additive list organic, sterile and natural rather than chemical-heavy. We do it the slower way because it’s the only way to produce an ink that holds colour without compromising on safety.

![tattoo artsist near me](https://testsite1.vip/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/tattoo-artsist-near-me.jpg)

### Bright, Long Lasting Tattoos

Can we say our ink is completely UV-proof? No, and we’d never claim that. If you go to Ibiza, lie in the sun until you look like a cooked lobster, and spend the flight home peeling layers of skin off your shoulders, no ink on earth will survive that intact.

What we can say is that under normal wear and tear, our techniques significantly offset the damaged encapsulation cycle that causes tattoos to dull and fade over the years. By keeping the pigment organic in nature, particle-matched to the ashes, and free of the cheap chemical fixes some manufacturers use, your tattoo stays bright and crisp for the long haul.

That’s the whole point of building our own inks rather than mixing ashes into someone else’s. We control every variable, from the pigment, to the viscosity, to the additive list, to the molecular size of the ashes themselves. The result is a [commemorative tattoo ink](https://cremationink.com/commemorative-tattoo-ink/)
 that’s built around the ashes from the very first ingredient, not adapted to them at the last minute.

We’ve simplified some of the more technical detail here, but hopefully you’ve learned a lot about what your loved one’s ashes are going into, and why we go to the lengths we do.

**Your loved one deserves the best, and at Cremation Ink ® we make sure they get it.**

When you feel ready, you can [order your inks here](https://cremationink.com/shop/)
. We’ll send out a kit, walk you through it, and look after the rest. Your favourite local artist takes care of the design.

![our tattoo inks faqs](https://testsite1.vip/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/ashes-tattoo-facts.jpg)Our Tattoo Inks FAQs

#### Do you use a known tattoo ink brand and add ashes to it?

No. Cremation Ink ® makes our own tattoo ink from the ground up, formulated specifically to carry cremation ashes alongside the pigment. Off-the-shelf tattoo ink is engineered to hold pigment only, and the moment you add ashes to it the viscosity changes and the suspension fails. Building the ink around the ashes from the very first ingredient is the only way to get this right, which is why we don’t rely on any third-party ink.

#### Why don’t ashes just sit in normal tattoo ink?

Because the particle size doesn’t match. Raw cremation ashes are far coarser than tattoo pigment, so within minutes of being tipped into a normal ink they sink to the bottom and stay there. The Cremation Ink ® process refines both the pigment and the ashes to the same molecular size, which is what keeps them in a true, even suspension throughout the bottle. That same-size match is the whole reason our ink works where a studio mix doesn’t.

#### What happens when a tattoo studio tips raw ashes straight into an ink pot?

Any reputable tattoo studio would never do this in the first place, because it isn’t safe for the client and the technique doesn’t actually deliver an ashes tattoo. The ashes sink within minutes, and a tattoo artist always feeds the needles from the centre of the pot, not the bottom. So even if a studio agreed to “mix it in,” your loved one’s ashes would sit at the bottom of the pot and never make it into the tattoo. Cremation Ink ® was built to solve exactly this problem, by handling the proper preparation in our UK lab before the bottle reaches your artist.

#### What pigment does Cremation Ink ® use?

Organic pigments that have been the backbone of professional tattooing for over forty years. We only work with suppliers who provide full traceability, manufacturing batch data, safety data sheets and heavy metal technical sheets. Out of the hundreds of tattoo ink suppliers worldwide, only around twenty provide both. Ours is one of them. Pigment quality is what your tattoo is built from, so we don’t compromise on it.

#### Why is the viscosity of an ashes tattoo ink so important?

A good tattoo ink needs a very specific low viscosity to flow through the needle and lay down evenly in the skin. Cremation Ink ® deliberately makes the base ink slightly too fluid on purpose, so when the prepared ashes are added in a precise, measured amount, the finished viscosity sits exactly where it needs to be for your tattoo artist. Get this balance wrong and the ink either runs too thin and won’t pack solid colour, or runs too thick and won’t line cleanly. The recipe is calibrated to fine tolerances.

#### Are your inks natural?

Yes. Cremation Ink ® uses only natural ingredients. Every ink in our shop is listed alongside its full component breakdown, excluding the ashes themselves. No hidden chemicals, no cheap fixes, no shortcuts taken to save manufacturing cost. The full transparency is part of why our ink is trusted.

#### What is encapsulation, and why does it matter for tattoo fade?

After a tattoo is done, your immune system surrounds the pigment in a protective shell so it can sit safely in the skin. Over time, UV light gradually fractures those shells, and the immune system re-encapsulates whatever pigment fragments break free. A small amount of pigment is lost each cycle. That’s what causes the slow fade you see in older tattoos. Cremation Ink ® is formulated to minimise that cycle as much as possible, which is why our tattoos hold colour longer.

#### Will my ashes tattoo fade?

Less than a standard tattoo, thanks to the way Cremation Ink ® is formulated, but no tattoo on earth is truly UV-proof. Keep the tattoo out of direct sun where you can, use SPF on it once it’s healed, and the colour will stay sharp for many years.

#### Why is Cremation Ink ® a better choice than asking an artist to mix ashes themselves?

Because we control every variable. The pigment, the viscosity, the additive list, the molecular size of the ashes, the sterilisation steps, the suspension chemistry. None of those can be replicated on the day at a tattoo studio, which is why doing this work in a studio is not safe for the client. The Cremation Ink ® bottle is the product of all of those controls working together, sent to you ready to use the way professional ink should be.

#### Is Cremation Ink ® easy for my tattoo artist to use?

Yes. Once the bottle arrives, it behaves like any quality professional tattoo ink in the machine. Lining, shading, packing colour, watercolour washes, fine line work, all of it. Your artist doesn’t need to learn anything new and doesn’t need any special equipment.

![all cremation tattoo ink - cremation ink](https://testsite1.vip/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/all-cremation-tattoo-ink.jpg)[Cremation Ink ® – Shop](https://cremationink.com/shop)

![tree of life memorial tattoo designs 6](https://testsite1.vip/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/tree-of-life-memorial-tattoo-designs-6-scaled.jpg)[Memorial tattoo Designs](https://cremationink.com/memorial-tattoo-designs/)