Cremation Ink ®

Who Are We?

Cremation Ink ® is an international company that takes a small amount of a client’s lost loved one’s cremation ashes and infuses them into high quality tattoo ink. The finished ink goes to you, and from there to your local tattoo studio, where your chosen artist creates a commemorative tattoo to memorialise your loved one for the rest of your life.

Behind that simple description sits over twenty years of work in this very bespoke field, thousands of clients across every populated continent, and a set of protocols we’ve built and refined to make sure every order is treated with the respect and care we’d want our own loved one to receive. We’re a small specialist team, not a corporate machine, and that’s what most of our clients say they value most.

Why The Old Way Didn’t Work

For many years before Cremation Ink ®, your everyday tattoo studio doing an ashes tattoo produced very hit-and-miss results. The problem came down to a mix of bad assumptions and missing equipment.

The biggest assumption was that the heat of cremation removed all the impurities in the ashes. It doesn’t, and we’ll explain why below. The other big problem was that ashes tipped straight into ink behave nothing like proper pigment. The studio’s ink would clog the tattoo machine, the artist would have to overwork the skin to get anything in, and the tattoo afterwards would scab heavily, fade patchily, or get rejected outright.

Word travelled. Even when clients still wanted ashes tattoos, most reputable studios moved away from doing them because the health and safety risks weren’t worth their licence. That left a real gap in the market, and a lot of grieving families with no safe way of doing what they really wanted to do.

Safe Ashes Tattoos, Done Properly

That’s the gap Cremation Ink ® was built to close. We provide a safe, regulated service where your loved one’s ashes are treated with respect at every stage by experts in this very specific field. With over twenty years of producing the best quality tattoo inks infused with our clients’ loved ones’ ashes, you’re in safe hands.

The way we keep things safe is layered. We control the regulated work off-site in our own lab, we run multiple protocols on the ashes before they’re ever near our pigment, and we use specialist equipment to do work no tattoo studio could do with what they have on their bench. The full safety story is set out in detail on our ashes into tattoo ink safe page, and the legal side, including our role as a UK-based third party, is covered on our ashes in tattoo ink is legal page.

Why You Can’t Just Drop Ashes Into Ink

There are two reasons a tattoo studio can’t simply mix your loved one’s ashes into the ink on the bench. Both are worth knowing about, because they explain why our service exists.

The first is mechanical. You can’t drop ashes into regular tattoo ink because the ashes act as a bulker, turning the ink into a thick, mud-like consistency. Ink in that state will clog any tattoo machine and won’t disperse properly under the skin. The artist would have to overwork the skin to get the ink to go in, causing extra trauma and a tattoo that doesn’t sit cleanly. The deeper version of this is covered on our mixing tattoo ink with ashes page.

The second is biological. The cremation process is not, and has never been, designed around sterility or health protocols. Cremation is the process of reducing the body to ashes using extreme heat. Once the body has been reduced, the remains are passed through a cremulator to bring the bone to a more uniform size, then funnelled into a plastic bag ready for handover to the family or funeral director. None of that includes sterilisation suitable for putting the ashes into a tattoo.

The Impurities In Cremation Ashes

For the most part, the cremation process removes the DNA structure of the body. But inside the honeycomb structure of human and animal bone, certain impurities can’t escape and be broken down by the heat. Trace heavy metals from medical implants or dental work, residue from medications taken in the final months of life, and other organic residue all stay locked inside the bone matrix and end up in the ashes you receive.

Your local tattooist can’t process these out, even if they have an autoclave on their bench. Removing them requires several pieces of specialist equipment and a sequence of preparation stages that simply can’t be done at a tattoo studio. This is why our work needs to happen first, off-site, before the ashes are anywhere near your artist’s machine.

Cremation Ink, The Experts In Ashes-Infused Tattoo Ink

We make our own high pigment tattoo ink, formulated specifically to work with the prepared ashes. In its base state, the pigment we use is intentionally low in viscosity, which means it’s actually too thin to use on its own. When the prepared ashes are introduced (after they’ve been processed), they bring the ink to the perfect working viscosity for tattooing. That’s the engineering side of why our ink works while a studio mix-job doesn’t.

The pigment side of our ink is made by seasoned tattoo artists, for exactly this purpose. We want you to be happy with the product, and we want your artist to be happy too. The finished ink works beautifully for lining, shading and packing colour, so whatever design you’ve chosen, your artist has a full toolkit in front of them.

For more on the broader product side, our tattoo ink with cremation ashes page covers it from a different angle.

Safe Ashes And Safe Tattoos

The ashes go through several stages of professional preparation to make sure they’re truly compatible with the tattoo ink, both in particle size and in how they disperse alongside the pigment. We use specialist equipment to extract the impurities from the ashes and catch them in filters, leaving an inert organic ash by the end of the process.

Married with the chosen ink, the result is perfect for the tattooist you’ve chosen. No rejection rate, safe for use in a tattoo, very high quality and sterile by the time it’s sealed and dispatched to you.

Anything we don’t use is returned to you. Your loved one’s ashes are never thrown away or kept by us. What you send to us, you get back, either inside the finished ink or alongside it in the same package. The deeper detail on how the ashes go through the system is on our putting cremation ashes in ink page, with the full step-by-step on our process page.

Why Artists Around The World Recommend Us

This is why tattoo artists from across the globe now send their clients to our service. They know they’re getting a clean, professional product, where the client’s safety has been the priority from the start, and where the ink itself is a pleasure to work with.

Reputation in the tattoo world spreads quietly, between artists, across cities, across continents. When a respected artist tells another artist that the ink they used on an ashes tattoo healed beautifully and behaved exactly like normal pigment, that artist starts recommending the same service. Over twenty years, that word-of-mouth has built into the global trust we have today. You can read real client feedback on our cremation ink reviews page, or read more about the team and the company on our about us page.

If you’d like to talk anything through before you order, contact us any time. We’re happy to answer questions, and we always reply.

When you feel ready, you can order your inks here. We’ll send out a kit, walk you through it, and look after the rest. Your local tattoo artist takes care of the design, your loved one stays with you, for life.

What is Cremation Ink ®?

Cremation Ink ® is the international service that takes a small amount of your loved one’s cremation ashes and infuses them into high quality professional tattoo ink. The finished bottle is sent back to you, ready for your local tattoo artist to use in creating a memorial tattoo. We’ve been doing this for over twenty years and we’re recognised as the experts in this very bespoke field.

How long has Cremation Ink ® been doing this?

Over twenty years. In that time Cremation Ink ® has worked with thousands of clients on every populated continent, refined the protocols, the safety standards and the specialist equipment used in our UK lab, and built the worldwide reputation that brings clients (and tattoo artists) back to us again and again.

Can a local tattoo studio just mix my loved one’s ashes into their ink for me?

Any reputable tattoo studio would never do this. A tattoo studio is not built for the lab work involved in preparing cremation remains, and doing this work in a studio is not safe for the client. Raw ashes still carry trace heavy metals, medicinal residue and other contaminants that need extracting before going under the skin, plus the particle size has to be reduced to match tattoo pigment, which a studio simply isn’t equipped to do. Cremation Ink ® was founded to be the UK-based specialist that handles all of that work properly, off-site, so by the time the bottle reaches your local artist the ashes are ready to be tattooed safely.

Why didn’t tattoo studios get this right before Cremation Ink ® existed?

Because raw ashes tipped straight into ink act as a bulker, thickening the ink to a mud-like consistency that clogs the tattoo machine and won’t disperse properly under the skin. The artist has to overwork the area to get any ink in, and the tattoo afterwards scabs, fades patchily or rejects outright. Most reputable studios stopped offering ashes tattoos for exactly these reasons. Cremation Ink ® fixed the problem by engineering an ink that’s perfectly viscosity-matched to receive the prepared ashes, so the finished bottle tattoos cleanly and heals properly.

Are cremation ashes safe to put in tattoo ink?

After preparation by Cremation Ink ®, yes. We filter trace heavy metals and medicinal residue out of the ashes, run them through multiple stages of sterilisation, and bind them at a molecular level into our high quality pigment. The risks people sometimes hear about online come from raw ashes being mixed into ink at a studio, which is a very different scenario from a properly prepared Cremation Ink ® bottle.

How does Cremation Ink ® protect my loved one’s ashes during the process?

Every order is assigned a unique profile code from the moment it’s placed. Your loved one’s ashes are tracked against that code from arrival at our UK lab, through every stage of the process, and back out to you. One technician handles your order from start to finish, with no other orders being processed in parallel. What you send to Cremation Ink ®, you get back, either inside the finished ink or alongside it in the same package.

How much of my loved one’s ashes do you need?

About a tablespoon per bottle of ashes tattoo ink. Cremation Ink ® uses only what’s needed for the infusion, and anything we don’t use is returned to you alongside the finished bottle. The urn at home isn’t emptied.

Does Cremation Ink ® ship internationally?

Yes. We ship finished ashes-infused tattoo ink tracked and signed for to clients on every populated continent. Wherever you are in the world, Cremation Ink ® can reach you, and your local tattoo artist takes care of the design from there.

How long does the whole process take?

Once your loved one’s ashes arrive at Cremation Ink ®, the finished ink is usually ready in around five to nine days, depending on lab workload at the time. The bottle is then posted back to you tracked and signed for. Most clients have everything in hand within two to three weeks from the day they place the order.

Where can I read reviews from Cremation Ink ® clients?

On our cremation ink reviews page, which holds genuine feedback from clients across the world who’ve used Cremation Ink ® for everything from a pet’s paw print to a full portrait of a parent.