A museum exhibit of tattooed works preserved after death.
Each piece required a human life to exist.
The Museum Exhibit
The Present - Artist Showcase
The Present documents tattooing as it exists today: precise, intentional, and fully matured as an art form. Each exhibition features three contemporary tattoo artists whose work extends beyond skin into painting, drawing, and design. These artists represent living mastery, showing not only what is made, but how and why it is made. This is tattooing in its current state of clarity and purpose.
The Future - Human Artifacts
The Future confronts what tattooing has never been allowed to become, permanent. Through preserved tattooed skin, the Human Archive presents artworks that required an entire human life to exist. These are not images transferred to canvas, but original works carried, aged, and lived with until death. Each artifact holds time, identity, and consent. This is the first moment tattooing enters history without being erased.
The Past - Historical Archive
The Past preserves the foundations of tattooing as a cultural and artistic practice. Original machines, hand-drawn flash, photographs, and rare artifacts trace the evolution of the craft from ritual and rebellion to discipline and mastery. This archive honors the lineage of artists who worked without recognition, establishing the visual language and technical knowledge that made everything that followed possible.
Debut Exhibition - 2026
This inaugural exhibition brings tattooing out of the margins and into its rightful context as enduring human art. What is shown here did not merely take skill to create, it required a life to exist.
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Scott Keathley — Left Arm (3D Preservation)
This work preserves Scott Keathley’s left arm as a three-dimensional artifact, removed intact and conserved as a complete skin form, held like a sleeve over a manufactured armature. The piece rotates slowly, allowing the tattoo to be seen as it existed in life, wrapped around the volume of a human limb rather than flattened into display. The tattoo itself was a cover-up, still in progress at the time of Scott’s death, revealing both the intention of transformation and the reality of interruption. As one of only two fully realized three-dimensional tattoo preservations ever created, this artifact documents not a finished image, but a life mid-process, preserved without correction, completion, or revision.
Custodianship
Beyond The Flesh does not “own” people or their skin. Works are preserved through custodial agreements that prioritize dignity, consent, and long-term care.
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