Barbara Lloyd McMichael

In 2011, a year after her husband’s suicide, Amber Martini walked into Testament Tattoo in Leavenworth, Kansas. “I had been emotionally frozen and I wanted to feel something,” she said in a recent interview.

Her husband, Army Sergeant Ralph Mena, Jr., had loved tattoos, and this was a way she could honor his memory. She worked with tattoo artist Clinton Burkes to develop a design that expressed her grief, her anger, and her...