Every tattoo begins with a person making a decision in the present. But that person will not remain exactly the same.

The body will age. The meaning may change. Relationships, beliefs, laws, technologies, and cultures will move around the mark. What began as art may become memory, evidence, data, inheritance - or something its wearer never intended.

In The Future Owner of Your Skin, Rayford Aquirre uses tattooing to investigate a larger human problem: what authority should one moment of our lives have over all the moments that follow?

Moving from the psychology of the future self to the biology of tattoo pigment, from regret and removal to forensic databases, Auschwitz prisoner numbers, copyright disputes, tā moko, preserved human skin, medical marking, and electronic tattoos, the book follows what happens when a seemingly simple image enters time.

Neither an argument for tattoos nor against them, this is a work of narrative nonfiction about permanence in a world where almost nothing stays still.

A tattoo does not preserve a person unchanged.

It preserves evidence that someone once chose.

And then time inherits the decision.