In the middle of her master's thesis, Shannon Bates met a pair of brothers who were tattooed from neck bone to ankle, the inky portraits dedicated to cherished kin.

They reserved their forearms for Mom, chose another patch of skin to honor a departed grandpa, and even cordoned off a leg as tribute to all their bygone dogs.

"One of them had drawn a stick figure of his grandfather when he was 8, which his mother framed, and he had that child's cartoon tattooed perfectly on his body," Bates said. "They're just walking testimonials of how much they loved the people in their lives."

Through her research, Bates intends to show the needle's power to heal deep grief, inspire happy memories of the dead and permanently capture the reflection of a lost love.

She saw a childhood sweetheart lost to cancer, a soldier killed in Iraq just days after getting engaged, a brother who succumbed to long sickness -- all of them recreated as permanent pigment.

In every case, she found the tattoo turned helped turn grief into joy, mourning into celebration.

"A lot of people said, 'I really felt like they were there again,'" said Bates, who is 34 and lives in North Raleigh. "There's nothing tangible about grief. This is a way the felt they could still hold a piece of that person."

Bates told her story over a cup of coffee as she thumbed through a book of yoga sutras. An office manager at Cisco Systems, she gets reimbursed for her graduate studies with The Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto, Calif., a distance-learning program that draws students worldwide. She studied Kundalini yoga, sand therapy, dance therapy -- any topic that examines spiritual well-being. It's handy knowledge for a career in customer service.

Her tattoo thesis grew partially out of watching "Miami Ink" on The Learning Channel, seeing sobbing customers ask for dead brothers on their forearms, grandmothers on their shoulders. But a deeper draw was Bates' own tattoo, the Buddhist goddess slowly taking shape between her neck and tailbone. She wanted to carry the goddess' energy around with her, a permanent talisman not unlike the tattoos she studied -- relatives looking on from the afterlife.

But Bates was always terrified of pain, couldn't bear the sight of blood. But every other week for the last two years, she has gritted her teeth through the stinging, calmed herself while Kathryn Moore at Durham's Dogstar Tattoo mopped the blood off her back. Once you learn it, Bates said, you can summon that sense of peace while sitting through a two-hour office meeting, or a traffic jam.

She guessed memorial tattoos would chase away the same kind of pain, so she hung up fliers in Whole Foods grocery, Panera Bread stores and yoga classrooms seeking interviews wihin an hour's drive of the Triangle.

There was the woman who lost her longtime boyfriend to cancer, and as he slowly died, discussed with him plans for tattoing their wedding bouquet as a celebration of love cut short. When her late husband's parents saw her memorial in ink, they followed suit. "And they weren't tattoo people," Bates said.

Moore, who is finishing Bates' goddess tattoo, suggested many of her customers for the study. Most every day, someone walks into Dogstar wanting a memorial piece, and they're every bit as traumatized as the people on "Miami Ink."

Not long ago, she tattooed a man who had lost an infant, and nearly lost his wife, in childbirth. He got the child's name in the shape of a spiral.

"Sometimes when I've done pieces," Moore said, "People are in tears. Sometimes I'm crying, too."

For Bates, tattoos are ritual: the smells of the ink, the sounds of the machine, the regular appointments stretching over years. And whether a tribute consists of a few initials, a birthdate, or a portrait detailed down to the gapped teeth, it's a way to stave off darkness and keep a fleeting face in sight.