An instinctive response to a strong composition slowly opens into a tattoo about Apollo and Dionysus: clarity and instinct, structure and release. Split across the stomach, the image stops being a fixed painting and becomes physical, changing with posture, breath, and movement. A classical reference, touched by Nietzsche, becomes a human tension carried on the body.

There are many reasons why parents choose to tattoo their children’s drawings. Some want to hold on to a moment that disappears almost as soon as it arrives — those early years when everything is drawn with instinct. No fear. No self-correction. No concern for what is right or wrong. Just marks made because the hand wanted to move. There is a strange honesty in that kind of drawing.

Porcelain appears everywhere — plates, cups, tiles, vessels — yet it never fully becomes ordinary. Too fragile for daily life and too precious to ignore, it carries memory through use, damage, and care. This Tattoo Journal text reflects on porcelain vases as recurring motifs in noTATTOO Berlin’s work, where fragility, structure, restraint, and survival move from object to skin.

Diana as Huntress, the marble sculpture by Bernardino Cametti, and its translation into a tattoo made at Visions of Ecstasy in Berlin. The text reflects on Diana beyond the hunt: movement, restraint, guardianship, clarity, and quiet authority. A figure caught mid-step becomes a study of strength without aggression, protection without control, and balance held in motion.

A Tattoo Journal text about a whale back piece inspired by Andrea Pozzo’s illusionistic ceiling in Chiesa di Sant’Ignazio in Rome. Made at Flourish Studio in Lisbon, the tattoo translates the sensation of architecture dissolving into sky: a whale drifting through uncertain space, surrounded by suggested lines and suspended movement. An unfinished work about perception, incompletion, and images still becoming.

Agnus Dei tattoo inspired by Francisco de Zurbarán’s restrained painting of a bound lamb. Made at Visions of Ecstasy for @triesteforpresident, the piece reflects on faith, sacrifice, vulnerability, and stillness. The tattoo preserves the quiet force of the original image through black ink, controlled linework, soft shading, and the gravity of a body at rest.

Based on La Jeunesse de Bacchus by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, this tattoo follows the energy of a mythological procession rather than the full complexity of the painting. Made at Visions of Ecstasy for @etions_formidables and placed behind the knee, the piece reflects on celebration, ritual, movement, endurance, and the need for moments where ordinary life gives way to another rhythm.

Mirów Castle stands as a ruin, but the legend beneath it continues to move. During the Swedish invasions of Poland, a nobleman named Count Hieronim Kreutz was said to have hidden treasure in underground chambers before disappearing. No record proves he ever existed, and no treasure was ever found. What remains is the possibility itself: a story about collapse, secrecy, and the things we keep searching for without needing certainty.

Made at Visions of Ecstasy for @nefiirafto, this tattoo began with the idea of two women suspended between a hug and a dance. The memory came from a photograph seen years earlier in a dentist’s waiting room: two women dancing inside a Moscow subway carriage, creating a small space of intimacy inside a place built for transit. A quiet tattoo about connection, rhythm, and the moments that stay without explanation.

A medieval bat from the 13th-century manuscript De Arte Venandi cum Avibus becomes a tattoo about observation, imagination, and the strange life of historical images. Its uncertain body and tiny human-like hands reveal a moment when knowledge reached its limits and invention took over. Made at Visions of Ecstasy in Berlin, the tattoo carries an awkward, charming creature across centuries, from manuscript page to skin.

Based on the Head of the so-called Dying Alexander, this tattoo reflects on power, uncertainty, and collapse. The late Hellenistic sculpture, now held in the Uffizi Galleries, was once associated with Alexander the Great, though its identity remains uncertain. Made at Visions of Ecstasy in Berlin, the tattoo holds the moment when greatness loses its certainty and what once seemed solid begins to come apart.

Calm on the surface, wild underneath. Based on a classical statue of Poseidon in Rome, this tattoo explores the god of the sea as a figure of restraint, force, and stored tension. Made at Visions of Ecstasy for @phxpp, the piece gained depth as it healed into the skin, becoming less like an image applied to the body and more like a presence: still, controlled, and ready to move.

Based on the myth of Sisyphus and Albert Camus’ reading of the absurd, this tattoo reflects on repetition, effort, and the weight we carry without resolution. Made at Visions of Ecstasy for @yung_xx_hans, the image becomes less about punishment than awareness: the stone still falls, the task remains, but meaning appears in the relationship we create with the climb itself.

Based on the architectural footprint of the Frankfurt Parliament at the Paulskirche and the stars of the European Union, this knee tattoo reflects on democracy as something unfinished and always in motion. Made at Visions of Ecstasy for @glingalex, it carries a quiet political history through structure, movement, failure, participation, and the fragile effort to imagine a collective future.

Made for the sailor @jackhro at Visions of Ecstasy in Berlin, this leopard fish tattoo combines camouflage, a hidden Neptune trident, red ink, and coordinates at 00°00′00″. The image became less about the sea as fantasy and more about navigation, discipline, endurance, and the invisible systems that make life at sea possible: a fish, a weapon, a map, and a line no one can see.

Bruegel’s figures still feel sharp, unsettling, and alive: twisted bodies, grotesque faces, humour that slowly becomes uncomfortable. These small tattoos follow that world of monsters, fools, peasants, and unstable gestures, where distortion becomes a way of observing human behaviour. Not historical decoration, but an attitude — a permission to let bodies misbehave and let chaos reveal what order hides.

Made for @christopherkieling, this tattoo follows Francisco Goya’s Two Men Fighting line by line, without reinterpretation. Taken from Album F, the drawing carries conflict through unstable marks, unresolved bodies, and the force between them.

A small drawer, tattooed in a kitchen on Maybachufer in 2016, became the beginning of noTATTOO Berlin. Raw, minimal, slightly crooked, and made before any formal studio path, the tattoo holds the uncertainty of those first days: trust, imperfect lines, and the strange honesty of making something with nothing to hide behind. A first tattoo about memory, hidden spaces, and learning through skin.

Made for Simon at Visions of Ecstasy in Berlin, this tattoo began with Avatar: The Last Airbender and Aang’s glider, but moved through an unexpected reference: a Lego version built by a child. From animated series to toy to skin, the image became a small bridge between generations, play, memory, and white ink technique — less about reproducing a character than following how stories survive by being rebuilt.

Made for @_niklahum, this tattoo isolates the fountain from The Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries, leaving behind the hunters, the unicorn, and the violence of the chase. Once removed from the full scene, the fountain becomes quieter and more open: a fragment of medieval symbolism about stillness, purification, and clarity. Not the hunt, not the capture, but the quiet centre still flowing.