The annotation reflects the state of the organism when it was observed. If you observed it alive and then killed it, it’s perfectly fine to annotate it as Alive. Contrary to how it is sometimes treated, “Dead” is not meant to be used as a content warning for pictures depicting something dead. Most collected specimens of plants and insects, for example, are photographed after they’ve been killed, but are properly annotated as “Alive.” Here’s an older post confirming this is the preferred practice:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/annotate-dead-or-alive/17537
The downside to annotating things you killed as “Dead” is that most researchers filtering to “Dead” are likely to be interested in organisms found dead, not organisms that were killed after being discovered before they were photographed. So personally, I would say definitely annotate the tick as “Alive”, since that’s how you found it- the state it was in when you took the picture is not what this annotation is meant to convey.
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