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Donating your skin as art: full body tattoos and the 'complete flay'

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Geoff Ostling
Geoff Ostling displays at his home in Petersham.()

Totally tattooed bear answers the door of heavily tattooed bear's house.

Geoff Ostling - nicknamed heavily tattooed bear, famous for pledging to donate his full bodysuit of tattoos to art - lives in suburban Sydney, in the inner-west of Petersham.

It is a sunny day of cricket at the park and kids squealing at the local pool. Geoff's mate and houseguest, Dewaine, nicknamed totally tattooed bear, shambles into a living room dense with books and paintings.

Dewaine has a long beard and a couple of rare pandas inked on his belly. We wait on a couch beneath a painting of a mushroom cloud. Next to the pandas are more endangered animals. Hibiscus on each breast. He's covering all of his body with flowers and animals. "So far what I've got on my upper body I'm pushing probably $15,000." He says he started the transformation two years ago. "I'm going every two weeks. I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to eat spending all my money getting tattooed."

"Any animal with a pretty skin is endangered," the panda-tattooed man says.

Geoff Ostling and Dewaine Fisher
Geoff Ostling, nicknamed heavily tattooed bear, and Dewaine Fisher, nicknamed totally tattooed bear.()

'All that money, all up in flames'

There was a story Geoff's skin would be donated to the National Museum. The museum told Hack it had been often asked about Geoff Ostling's skin but it was definitely going elsewhere. The National Gallery of Victoria said it was probably going to the museum, "not NGA [National Gallery of Australia] or us".

The NGA wrote back, "there has been no formal discussion on the matter". It can only formally consider the donation when it actually has the preserved skin.

Geoff says he has a "verbal agreement" with a director at the NGA, which is the best assurance he can get before unnamed parties flay the skin from his body, wrap it around a fiberglass mannequin, leave it to cure, and then present the leather suit to curators.

But there is a hitch: no-one has ever done this before. No-one has ever donated all of their skin. The closest thing to what is called a "complete flay" are ancient war trophies.

Geoff made his pledge in 2009. A documentary from that year tells his story. He was a 42-year-old history teacher when the artist eX de Medici gave him his first tattoo. "Thinking about your own death is a fairly confronting thing to do," says de Medici, who has gone on to become famous. She has more than a dozen paintings in the NGA. Her work sells for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"I think that was very hard for him - to confront what might happen to his remains. When we started there was a whole different discussion. Won't it be funny to throw my carcass into the fire when I die? All that money, all up in flames. We used to think that was quite funny in a way. It was just like lighting your cigarette with your money.

"And then something changed."

Geoff Ostling
Geoff Ostling()

'The skin begins to decay the moment you die'

Geoff, who is pushing 70, enters from upstairs via an inclinator - a motorised chair mounted to a stair rail. An electric motor buzzes and he slowly descends into the living room.

Seated on the couch he unbuttons his shirt. He is covered in twisted blooms of flowers with no empty space between them, no sense of them being separate tattoos. Behind the flowers is black ink.

"It's a story of my life and the gardens I've had and owned and worked in over the year," he says with the precise diction of a former teacher. "There's lots of Australian natives. Azaleas, strelitzias and poinsettias as well as daphne, jacarandas and wisteria."

His partner of 21 years, Jo, declines to be interviewed. When the tape recorder batteries go flat Jo appears with fresh batteries. Then he goes back upstairs. "If I were to die today it's a matter of getting on to the funeral director and getting me into a refrigerator as soon as possible," Geoff says. "Otherwise the skin begins to decay the moment you die."

"[Jo] wants me to be completely organised so if I were to drop dead today a whole series of people would come together to organise for the skin to be flayed of the body."

"The funeral would take place after that.

Geoff won't say what Jo thinks about his lover's skin going on public display.

"Perhaps he'll have to work that out for himself."

Geoff Ostling
Geoff Ostling at home in Petersham.()

'You'd want to shape it like taxidermy'

Others may follow Geoff's lead. More and more people are getting inked, and in the the United States there's a new non-profit for preserving tattoos. When a member of the National Association for the Preservation of Skin Art (NAPSA) dies, the funeral home is sent a kit to remove the nominated patch of skin and halt its decomposition. They then send the skin to the association. Up to six months later the loved one receives the framed memento.

But there is no modern precedent for donating an entire skin, according to Dr Gemma Angel, a cultural anthropologist who specialises in the meaning of tattoos. "There's one or two complete flays but these tend to come from contexts of war," she says. "You wouldn't consider them art objects.

"They're grotesque in a way."

"It would take a skilled anatomist to take the skin off. You'd want it to be preserved in three dimensions - treat it in the wet state before it dries and shrinks. You'd want to shape it like taxidermy. You'd need a mould to fit it around and make it look human".

Save My Ink skin art preservation, dagger image
A tattoo preserved by NAPSA.
A tattoo, cut from a corpse and embalmed, framed as part of a service called Save My Ink by the National Association for the Preservation of Skin Art, based in Cleveland in the United States. A picture of hunter's bow with heart.

She says she has received only a few emails from people interested in preserving tattoos. "It's a living art form," she says. "It seems strange wanting to take it off and preserve it. Once tattoos are removed from a body their meanings proliferate."

"It really depends where you are in the world, whether you still own your tattoos or not."

'I knew the person that was wearing this'

Totally tattooed bears' real name is Dewaine Fisher. He's from Chattanooga. Actually his first tattoo was not two years ago. Some kind of orange monkey, possibly an orangutan, sits on his left shoulder, (to the right of the lion with flaming orange wings), concealing a much older tattoo. When he was 18 he had the Great Seal of the United States tattooed on his body: an eagle holding a bunch of leaves in one talon and a quiver of arrows in the other. Years later he got the eagle lasered.

"I didn't have any loyalty to that," he says.

Back home he works as a construction manager. Two years ago he emailed Geoff after seeing a photo online. He had hankerings for a bodysuit something similar. "It wasn't planned we'd become great friends it just happened." In Israel last year they got matching Jerusalem crosses on their wrists - a tradition that goes right back to the medieval period, when pilgrims to the Holy Land would have the cross tattooed as proof they had made the journey.

"There's a difference between having your body fully covered in tattoos and having a themed bodysuit where it doesn't look like a bunch of magnets on the refrigerator," Dewaine says.

He doesn't know what he thinks about Geoff's idea of donating his skin. "If you don't know the person you can look at it and say wow. If you do know the person you got that bittersweet; I knew the person that was wearing this.

"I would make another trip at the point he's gone. I would do that because he is a friend. But it's going to be hard to see him."

Geoff himself seems nonplussed by these reservations. He recognises himself as a showman, not far removed from the 'tattooed man' attraction of long-ago circuses. He seems to delight in offending bourgeois sensibilities. "The thing that most people are most interested in is genital tattoos," he offers, during a pause in conversation.

"Whether you have your equipment tattooed. And the answer is yes of course. Why wouldn't you get your penis or ball sack tattooed?"

Geoff Ostling
"It doesn't look like a bunch of magnets on the refrigerator," Geoff's friend Dewaine says.()

'Just the body you no longer need'

Geoff claims his skin could be sold for "half a million dollars on the illegal market trafficking tattoos," but could not provide more details. If the skin is knocked back by the NGA it would be offered to Powerhouse Museum in Sydney and then the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart. "I'm quite certain they would like it very much."

Geoff and Dewaine pose for a photo at the front gate beside the wheelie bin. Two jovial shirtless grey-beards on a Sydney sidewalk. "It's a bit like leaving your heart or kidneys or some other organ of your body to somebody else," says Geoff about the prospect of one day being flayed. "You don't know anything about it. You're not there. It's just the body you once had and no longer need."

Tattoos are often seen as intimidating. But rather than being totemic symbols of aggressive masculinity, Geoff's tattoos, as well as Dewaine's, seem to express the fragility of their bodies.

"eX the tattoo artist said tattoos sleep all day and they come out at night," Geoff says. "The enemy is sunlight."

Then they go back inside.

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Sydney, Visual Art, Health, Human Interest