‘FETUS IN JAR’ SHOCK

Safety-deposit find

Workers at a Greenwich Village bank who were clearing out the safety-deposit boxes for a recent move found one that had been abandoned and cracked it open.

What they found inside was so creepy, they called the NYPD to investigate. It was a fetus. In a jar. The cops tracked down the box’s owner — a tattoo artist whose clients include Johnny Depp — and totally ruined his day.

“Now everything’s so f--king politically correct. You can’t have anything,” said Jonathan Shaw, whose dad was big-band legend Artie Shaw.

“I guess they opened the box and they freaked out.”

Shaw told detectives he picked up the fetus in the 1970s or 1980s at a flea market on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan.

“It’s an old antique medical specimen,” Shaw told The Post. “It’s in a jar. The old-time carnies would call them pickled punks.”

He said he hadn’t thought about the safety-deposit box at the La Guardia Place Citibank since he moved in 2002, and was surprised the NYPD got involved.

“I don’t collect that kind of stuff anymore. I got rid of the shrunken heads,” he said.

Police sources said there is no suspected criminality, but the city medical examiner will examine the contents of the jar.

Shaw opened a tattoo parlor, Fun City, on St. Marks Place and was featured in Rolling Stone in 2015 as “the next Bukowski.”

“Back in the ’90s and before that, there was a pretty thriving flea market on Sixth Avenue in the 20s,” he said.

“I used to run into people like Andy Warhol. There was all kinds of crazy stuff up there.”

He said he was walking around with Depp at the flea market once and a guy who knew him as a collector of weird stuff came running up.

“He said, ‘You have to check this out!’ ” Shaw recalled. “He had a bag of human fingers.”

Shaw said he has done most of Depp’s tattoos. He also founded one of the first tatoo magazines in the ’80s.

His father was heralded as one of the most influential big-band leaders of the swing era, and his mother was actress Doris Dowling.