Under Advisement Ruling
In re the Estate of A.R., Case No. PB2026-00451
SUPERIOR COURT OF ARIZONA, PIMA COUNTY
In re the Estate of A.R., Deceased.
UNDER ADVISEMENT RULING AND ORDER
(Formal Probate of Will; Objection; Petition for Adjudication of Intestacy; Motion to Strike Tendered Original)
Before the court are three matters, consolidated for evidentiary hearing on May 4 through May 6, 2026: the petition of T.A. for formal probate of the will of A.R. and for appointment as personal representative; the objection of D.T., the decedent’s daughter and sole heir at law, together with her cross-petition for adjudication of intestacy; and Objector’s motion to strike the tendered original instrument from the record of this proceeding. The court heard testimony from eleven witnesses, received forty-two exhibits, and took a view of the original instrument in the custody of the Office of the Medical Examiner. The matters were taken under advisement. The court now rules.
The objection is taken up in the order pleaded. The motion to strike, though it is logically the first question, was filed last and argued last, and the court decides it last, for reasons that will become apparent.
FINDINGS OF FACT
A.R. died on November 9, 2025, at the age of seventy-one, of cardiac arrest, at his home in Tucson. His wife, L.M., predeceased him in 2011. D.T. is his only child.
In March 2013, sixteen months after his wife’s death, the decedent presented himself at Vermilion Atelier, a tattoo studio on Fourth Avenue, and engaged its proprietor, T.A., for what the studio’s intake form describes as “full torso and limbs, text, long project.” What the decedent commissioned, and what T.A. executed over the following eleven years and forty documented sittings, was his last will and testament.
The instrument occupies the greater part of the decedent’s skin. The exordium crosses the sternum. The appointment of a personal representative and the specific devises descend the left arm. The residuary clause lies between the shoulder blades. A clause directing the recovery and lodging of the instrument occupies the right thigh. A forfeiture clause sits at the base of the spine and is discussed in Part VI. The attestation block occupies the left shoulder.
Each sitting is recorded in the studio’s log, which the court received as Exhibit 7 and finds credible. The log records the date of each sitting, the clauses executed, and T.A.’s uniform practice, corroborated by three witnesses, of reading each completed clause aloud to the decedent at the close of the session, and of reading the instrument through in its entirety, aloud, at the first sitting of each calendar year. The log also contains photographs of the completed work, made at intervals and furnished to the decedent, including photographs of his back.
All dispositive text was completed by June 14, 2016, the twenty-third sitting. On that date the instrument was executed. The decedent, taking the machine in his own hand for the only time in the project, tattooed his signature on his left pectoral. The line of the signature is unpracticed and wavers; the forensic document examiner retained by the objector conceded on cross-examination that its tremor distinguishes it from every line of T.A.’s on the body, and that it is consistent with exemplars of the decedent’s signature in ink. Two witnesses, D.O. and M.S., employees of the studio, then signed the will in the attestation block, each tattooing his or her own name into the decedent’s shoulder, at his request, in his presence, and in the presence of each other; the attestation block bears the date June 14, 2016, inked beneath their names. The decedent’s written consent to the work, and his verbal publication of the will at execution, are both in evidence.
The seventeen sittings after execution added no dispositive text. The log describes them as “border and illumination,” and the court, having viewed the instrument, adopts the word: the later work frames the clauses in the manner of illuminated manuscripts, ornament in the margins, the text untouched.
The project outran the decedent’s means. A career embalmer, the decedent was terminated from his long-term position with North Lawn Palms mortuary after a matter of some scandal, irrelevant to the case at hand, though the objector labored at trial to make it otherwise. His liquid resources thereafter diminished rapidly. The studio’s ledger, Exhibit 12, records his payments through the eighteenth sitting, in late 2014, and records nothing after.
On March 6, 2015, the decedent and T.A. signed a one-page memorandum on the studio’s letterhead, Exhibit 13, in which T.A. agreed to complete the instrument, and all further work upon it, without charge during the decedent’s lifetime, and the decedent agreed to leave T.A. “sufficient recompense upon my death, by the will he is writing.” The decedent’s signature on the memorandum is in ink, on paper, and is not disputed. Twenty-two sittings followed it. None was billed.
Article Third of the will devised the dwelling at 56 W. Lancelot Court, Tucson, Arizona, to “my daughter, D.T.” Article Fifth, the residuary clause, provides: “All the rest and residue of my estate I give to T.A., the hand that wrote me, in satisfaction of our agreement of March 6, 2015.”
In February 2019, D.T. petitioned this court for the appointment of a conservator for her father, filing photographs of the instrument, then six years in progress, as her principal exhibit. The court-appointed evaluator, Dr. M.W., examined the decedent and reported: “The plan is eccentric; the mind executing it is orderly.” The petition was dismissed on March 21, 2019.
Article Third was burned out of the decedent’s left forearm with a soldering iron during his lifetime. The scar obliterates the devise in its entirety, and the words beneath it cannot be recovered. The Medical Examiner finds, and the court adopts the finding, that the scar shows granulation and remodeling consistent with an age of several years. M.S. testified that at the first sitting after the dismissal of the conservatorship petition the burn was present and freshly dressed, and that the decedent told him his daughter no longer had a place in the will. The court finds that the burn was made by the decedent’s own hand within days of the dismissal.
The clause on the right thigh, executed in 2015 and thus before attestation, provides: “Upon my death my personal representative shall cause this instrument to be recovered whole from my remains and lodged with the clerk of the court, and what remains of me after shall be burned.”
The decedent died on a Sunday morning. His body was received that afternoon at Desert Sage Mortuary by G.F., a licensed embalmer of twenty-two years’ standing and a friend of T.A. since boyhood. T.A. came to the mortuary that evening and showed G.F. the clause on the right thigh. G.F. testified that he read the clause twice, photographed it, telephoned no one, and did the work that night. The court finds that he acted in good faith reliance on what appeared to him, reasonably, to be the written direction of the decedent himself. The excision was performed with professional competence. The instrument was recovered whole, preserved by G.F. according to methods within his training, and the remains were cremated in accordance with the clause. T.A. took custody of the instrument on November 12 and lodged it with the clerk of this court on November 14, five days after death.
D.T. learned of the excision from the crematory’s paperwork. Her motion to strike followed.
CONCLUSIONS OF LAW
I. Execution
A paper will must be in writing, signed by the testator, and signed by at least two witnesses. A.R.S. § 14-2502. The objector leans on the word “paper.” The word does not decide the case; the definition does. Title 14 defines a paper will as a testamentary instrument executed and maintained on a tangible medium, and a tangible medium as one on which information may be inscribed and afterward read directly. A.R.S. § 14-1201. The statutory term is a term of art, not a cellulose requirement. Skin takes ink and yields it to the eye. The courts of other jurisdictions have entertained, and sometimes admitted, wills scratched into a tractor fender, written on a bedroom wall, offered on an eggshell, and typed into an unsent message on a telephone. The legislature asked for a tangible medium inscribed and readable, and this court will not add a requirement it omitted merely because no prior decedent has offered his own body as the folio.
The objector argues the instrument fails as a holographic will under A.R.S. § 14-2503 because the material provisions are in T.A.’s hand. She is correct, and it does not matter. The proponent offers the instrument as an attested will, and as an attested will it complies: a writing on a tangible medium; the testator’s signature, made by his own hand, in his own tremor, distinguishable at a glance from the scrivener’s professional line; and two witnesses who signed the will itself, at the same sitting, in the testator’s presence. The witnesses are bound into the instrument they attested. Execution is valid.
II. Capacity
The objector renews, as insane delusion, the theory she advanced in 2019: that a man who believes his skin is proper paper for a will is not of sound mind. A delusion is a fixed belief in facts that do not exist, maintained against all evidence. The decedent believed his skin could carry his will, and the instrument before the court proves the belief sound. The 2019 evaluation, made by an independent examiner at the objector’s own instance, found an orderly mind executing an eccentric plan, and nothing in this record disturbs that finding. The objector also pressed the circumstances of the decedent’s departure from his profession. The court heard them, finds they bear on neither capacity nor influence, and does not repeat them here. Eccentricity is not incapacity, and the law of wills exists in large part to protect the eccentric testator from the tidy heir.
The objector’s better theory is narrower: not that her father’s mind was disordered, but that his judgment of her was, a fixed and extreme animus resting on grievances the record leaves unproven and perhaps unfounded, and that the dispositions it produced should fall with it. The theory states the law correctly and the facts insufficiently. A harsh, extreme, even unjust judgment of one’s own child is not a delusion merely because it is unproven, or because it is wrong; the standard remains a belief no rational person could hold on the evidence before him, and this record shows a grievance, not a phantom. The law of wills protects the testator who misjudges his children as fully as the one who judges them truly, because the alternative is a court that audits the fairness of every parent’s heart, and Title 14 gives this court no such commission. The objection on grounds of capacity is overruled.
III. Knowledge and Approval
The objector next argues that the dispositive heart of this will, the residuary clause, sat between the decedent’s shoulder blades, that he is not shown ever to have read it, and that a testator cannot approve what he has not read.
The premise is not established on the facts, and it would not decide the law if it were. The clause was behind the testator, which is not the same as beyond him. A mirror would have served. So would the studio’s photographs of the completed work, furnished to him over the years, including photographs of his back. So, for that matter, would the photographs the objector herself filed in the 2019 proceeding, served on the decedent as a party. The record does not show whether he used any of these; it shows that they were his to use, and the objector cannot build lack of knowledge on an inspection he was free to make at any time.
Nor would the premise carry the objection if it were proven. Knowledge and approval concern the testator’s understanding of the words that dispose of his property, not the angle of his eyes at execution. Blind testators execute valid wills. Testators who cannot read execute valid wills. The question is whether the contents were brought home to the testator’s mind, and on this record the question is not close. The will was read aloud to this testator clause by clause as it was made, and read through in its entirety once a year for eleven years. He did not know his will as most testators do, as a paper signed in an afternoon in a lawyer’s office; he knew it at the rate of a clause per season, for four thousand days. The court finds he knew and approved its contents.
The boundary of this holding matters to Part IV, and the court draws it now. Knowledge and approval concern the testator’s understanding of the words. Whose disposition the words expressed is a different question, answered on different evidence.
IV. Undue Influence
T.A. prepared this will and is its principal beneficiary. The presumption of undue influence arises, and the burden falls to him to rebut it by a preponderance of the evidence. A.R.S. § 14-2712. The objector’s case for leaving the presumption unrebutted has real force, and the court states it fairly. For eleven years the beneficiary was the medium of the testator’s knowledge of the gift: the readings were in his voice, the photographs were his studio’s, and no witness recounts the testator reading Article Fifth in a mirror, reciting it, or asking anyone other than its beneficiary what his back said. A proponent, the objector argues, should not carry his burden with proof that he was himself the channel.
The argument would trouble the court if Article Fifth were only a gift. It is also a debt. A contract to make a will may be established by the provisions of the will itself, by an express reference in the will to the contract together with extrinsic evidence of its terms, or by a writing signed by the decedent evidencing it. A.R.S. § 14-2514. This record contains at least two of the three statutory forms, and arguably the third: Article Fifth expressly refers to the agreement, reciting that the residue passes “in satisfaction of our agreement of March 6, 2015”; the memorandum of that date, signed by the decedent in ink on paper, is in evidence; and the ledger proves the performance, twenty-two sittings across nine years, none billed. The residuary devise is not mere bounty. It is the price of the instrument that contains it, fixed after the project had outrun the decedent’s means, when the choice before him was payment at death or an unfinished will. Undue influence is proved by showing that a disposition records the beneficiary’s desire in place of the testator’s. A bargain is the testator’s desire, recorded twice, once on paper and once on his back, and the paper record is the one thing in this estate plan that never passed through the beneficiary’s needle.
The objector answers that a contract can be procured by influence as readily as a will. It can. But against the memorandum she offers only the relationship itself, and the terms of the exchange tell against her. M.S. testified, and the court finds, that the decedent proposed it. The decedent received under it a decade of further work without charge. And the memorandum left untouched the one power that matters, the power of revocation: had the testator burned Article Fifth as he burned Article Third, T.A.’s remedy would have sounded in contract against the estate, not in the will. The testator kept the iron. He used it once, on the clause he chose. He never raised it to the clause that paid his debt, and the court declines to treat the honoring of an obligation as evidence that the obligation was extracted.
The objector’s last position is that the exchange is unconscionable: an estate for a tattoo. Adequacy of consideration is not ordinarily this court’s audit. “Sufficient recompense” was the promise, and the testator, not the artist, chose its measure. Whatever uncertainty attended the phrase in 2015 was resolved by Article Fifth in 2016, when the decedent fixed the measure as the residue, and by the nine years that followed, in which he left it undisturbed. The court does not hold that a scrivener may buy his gift’s immunity with any scrap of paper. It holds that this record contains a real bargain, really performed, for nine years, and that the presumption is rebutted by a preponderance of the evidence. Part III asked whether the testator knew the words on his back. This Part asks whose disposition they were, and the answer is that they were his, in the plainest sense the law recognizes: the debt they satisfied was his own. The residuary gift to T.A. stands.
V. Revocation of Article Third
A will is ambulatory during the testator’s lifetime: it walks with him, revocable at every step, and speaks only when he stops. No instrument has honored the doctrine so literally. This will ambulated for nine years after its execution, through the rooms of the decedent’s house and the streets of this city, and the doctrine’s point, that a living testator may always change his will, was proven upon it with a soldering iron. A will, or any part of it, is revoked by a revocatory act performed on the will with revocatory intent, and burning is among the acts the statute names. A.R.S. § 14-2507. The devise of 56 W. Lancelot Court, Tucson, Arizona, was burned out of the will by the testator’s own hand, with an intent proven by the calendar, the healed scar, and his statement to M.S. On skin there is no deletion, only overwriting: the scar is itself a legible record of the act of revocation, healed into the instrument. It is the only clause of this will the testator made entirely himself. Article Third is revoked.
The revoked devise falls into the residue, and the residue passes under Article Fifth. The house the decedent once gave his daughter goes with the rest of the estate to T.A. The court notes, because the record forces the notice, that the photographs the objector filed in 2019 to prove her father incompetent are the evidence that dates the act by which he removed her.
VI. The Forfeiture Clause
At the base of the spine the will provides: “Should any person contest this instrument, let that person take instead that which the arrow shows.” Beneath the text a tattooed arrow descends and terminates at the rim of the body’s lowest aperture, which the testator did not make and the needle did not touch, though it approached to the point of offense, and which the arrow indicates as plainly as any exhibit sticker in this record.
The objector calls the clause an obscenity and moves to redact it, together with its terminus, from the record. The court takes offense at the inclusion of the full apparatus of the decedent’s rear aperture in the record of a judicial proceeding, and says so. The offense changes nothing. The decedent succeeded, unfortunately, in assigning the feature a testamentary significance that makes it inextricable from the larger instrument: the clause is incomplete without its terminus, the terminus is illegible without the clause, and his intent in that regard is underscored, in the strictest sense of the word, by the nature of that particular device. The court has never seen a forfeiture clause reduced so pointedly to an eye, looking forever askance at any would-be contestant. The court does not admire the medium. But its mandate is to discern and give effect to a decedent’s intent, and this decedent’s cannot be mistaken. The motion to redact is denied.
What may not be redacted need not be enforced. Whether a natural feature of the testator’s body, unwritten but deliberately indicated, may be incorporated into an instrument by reference is a question of first impression, and the court does not reach it, because the clause fails twice over on settled law. A penalty clause is unenforceable against a contestant who acts with probable cause, A.R.S. § 14-2517, and D.T., whatever else is said of her contest, had probable cause in abundance. And a forfeiture clause operates by taking a beneficiary’s gift; D.T.’s only gift under this will was revoked by fire in 2019. A forfeiture operating on a beneficiary of nothing forfeits nothing. The arrow points at an empty threat. The court says no more about it, except what the clerk’s inventory will say in the final paragraph of this order.
VII. Motion to Strike the Original Instrument
Last, as pleaded, the objector moves to strike the tendered original from the record: the excision, she argues, was an unlicensed and criminal mutilation of remains, arranged between two friends over the objection no one gave her the chance to make, and the court should not receive the fruit of it.
Three answers, in ascending order.
First, there is no exclusionary rule in probate. A will unlawfully obtained is still a will; the law’s remedy for the manner of its obtaining runs against the actors, in the criminal law and in tort, not against the instrument. The objector’s authorities are suppression cases, and this is not a prosecution.
Second, the recovery was authorized, and authorized by the decedent. Arizona law permits a legally competent adult to direct, in a written statement, the lawful disposition of his own remains, and that direction controls over the wishes of his survivors. A.R.S. § 32-1365.01. The statute asks that the writing be signed and dated and either notarized or witnessed by an adult. The clause on the right thigh is part of an instrument signed by the decedent, dated by its attestation, and witnessed by two adults; the same execution that satisfied § 14-2502 satisfied the formalities of the directive. The objector notes that the clause names the personal representative as its actor, and that none had been appointed on the night the work was done. The direction names the personal representative because that is the office the decedent expected to administer his affairs; it does not make court appointment a condition precedent to preservation of the instrument. The operative command is the decedent’s own: recover, lodge, burn the rest. Nor was the command naive. The decedent spent his working life in the profession he conscripted for this task; the direction was written by a man who knew what he was asking and of whom. G.F. read the direction in the decedent’s own instrument and relied on it in good faith. The court finds his reliance reasonable and declines to refer his conduct anywhere.
The objector answers that this is a bootstrap: the clause authorizing the recovery is a clause of the very will whose validity was unknown until this ruling, so the excision was performed on the authority of an instrument that was, at the hour of the incision, nothing at all. The objection is candid and deserves a direct answer. Admission to probate does not make a will valid; it declares a validity that existed at the moment of death. This will was the decedent’s will from the moment he died on the morning of November 9, whether or not any court had yet said so, and the clause on the thigh spoke with his authority from that moment. What the objector calls a bootstrap the law calls relation back. The oldest statement of the underlying rule is not statutory: “For where a testament is, there must also of necessity be the death of the testator. For a testament is of force after men are dead.” Hebrews 9:16-17. This instrument could not operate until its author died, and his death was not only its condition but its procedure. The court finds nothing in Title 14 that forbids a will from providing for its own preservation.
Third, the objector’s better argument, pleaded in the alternative, is custody: between the excision and the filing, the original instrument spent three days in the private possession of the proponent, the sole residuary beneficiary and the man with the most to gain from its text, and on this instrument alteration does not mean a pen stroke. It means an iron. How is the court to know T.A. did not burn out rival clauses of his own in those three days, as the testator once burned out hers?
Counsel for the objector, pressing the point at argument, called the tendered original a living will, and intended the anachronism as ridicule. The term belongs to a different statute and a different instrument, see A.R.S. § 36-3261, and it has always been a poor name: the document it names neither lives nor is a will. Here, for once, the words fit, and they contain the answer to the objection.
Dead skin does not heal. The Medical Examiner testified, and the court finds, that every mark of revocation on this instrument shows vital reaction: granulation and remodeling, the work of living tissue. The scar over Article Third healed for six years. A burn made after death would present raw, unhealed, and unmistakable, and there is none. The instrument authenticates itself in a manner no document examiner could supply and no statute anticipated: it was alive when it was written, and its wounds prove which hand made them, and when. The chain of custody that the law ordinarily supplies by affidavit, this will supplies by biology. The motion to strike is denied.
There remains the instrument’s keeping. The clerk of this court cannot vault what T.A. delivered, and the court will not ask it. The precedent, such as it is, comes from Saskatchewan: the fender of Cecil Harris’s tractor, bearing the will he scratched into it as he died beneath it, was severed from the machine and rests today in the library of a law school, an instrument outliving its vehicle. The law has severed a will from its vehicle before. It has never had to decide, until now, which one was which.
ORDERS
Accordingly,
IT IS ORDERED admitting the instrument tendered November 14, 2025 to formal probate as the last will and testament of A.R., validly executed June 14, 2016;
IT IS FURTHER ORDERED adjudging Article Third revoked by the testator’s revocatory act in 2019, and adjudging the devise therein lapsed into the residue;
IT IS FURTHER ORDERED adjudging the presumption of undue influence rebutted, adjudging the residuary gift to T.A. valid as made in satisfaction of a contract established under A.R.S. § 14-2514, and adjudging that the residue, comprising the entire probate estate, passes to T.A. under Article Fifth;
IT IS FURTHER ORDERED denying the cross-petition for adjudication of intestacy, granting the petition of T.A. for appointment as personal representative, letters to issue upon filing of the statement of acceptance and bond;
IT IS FURTHER ORDERED adjudging the forfeiture clause unenforceable;
IT IS FURTHER ORDERED denying the motion to strike; directing that the original instrument be transferred to a qualified conservator for permanent preservation at the expense of the estate; and directing that upon completion it be deposited with the clerk under seal, to be opened only upon order of this court;
AND IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that the clerk note upon the inventory: one instrument, received whole, all termini included.
Nothing in this record shows that the daughter deserved what was done to her in it. Nothing in Title 14 asks whether she did. Every clause of this will stands except the one its author burned, and that one fell to the only power the law never takes from a living testator. The instrument was ambulatory for exactly as long as its maker. They stopped together, on a Sunday morning in November, and what a will becomes when it stops is on file with the clerk.
DATED this 2nd day of June, 2026.
/s/ M.O.
Judge of the Superior Court