Plato and Fornasetti's muse

Written By jorge cruz

Plato called them the Spherical People.

This tattoo began with one of my favourite and lesser-known myths: the story Aristophanes tells in Plato’s Symposium. In that story, humans were once whole beings — spherical, complete, powerful in their unity. Zeus, fearing their strength, split them in half. Since then, each person has moved through the world searching for the missing part from which they were separated.

It is a strange and tender explanation of love, identity, and longing. Not romantic in a soft or sentimental way, but existential. Love appears as recognition. Desire becomes memory. The myth suggests that something essential was once taken from us, and that our relationships are shaped by the absence it left behind.

But this tattoo did not begin with me alone.

The first person to bring this myth into my work was Vale, a long-time client and someone very dear to me. We have worked together many times over the years, and there is a level of trust there that allows ideas to unfold slowly, without pressure. She came to me specifically wanting a design based on Plato’s spherical people.

I made several sketches for her, with different approaches and different moods, but none of them settled in the way they needed to. The timing was not right. The image did not yet belong to the body in front of it. So we let it go without forcing anything.

Still, I could not let go of the idea.

Something about those spherical bodies stayed with me: their simplicity, their strangeness, and the way the myth speaks through form rather than explanation. I kept the drawing in my portfolio, not as a finished answer, but as a possibility waiting for the right person.

Then Johanna Frieg saw it.

She recognised it immediately. There was no hesitation, no need to change the drawing, no long process of adjustment. The image made sense to her body, especially as a leg tattoo, where movement, balance, and rotation are already part of the composition. Suddenly, the drawing found its place.

That is something I have learned to trust over time. Some images do not belong to the first person who inspires them. They need to circulate. They need to pass through conversations, pauses, failed attempts, and different bodies before they arrive where they are meant to be.

In that sense, this tattoo is also a quiet tribute to Vale. She brought the myth into our shared space. She planted the seed. Even though the image did not end up on her skin, her presence remains inside the piece. Without her curiosity, this tattoo would not exist in the same way.

The final drawing also carries another influence: the visual language of Fornasetti, especially the poetic and slightly surreal quality of bodies, faces, and decorative forms that feel both elegant and strange. The result is not a direct illustration of Plato’s myth, and not a direct quotation of Fornasetti either. It is something between them: a distilled gesture, symbolic without becoming literal, familiar but slightly off.

That is what I love about how ideas move through tattooing. They are rarely fixed. They travel from person to person, changing tone as they move. By the time an image reaches the skin, it may already carry several histories: the ancient myth, the artist who shaped the drawing, the first client who imagined it, and the person who finally chose to carry it.

This piece holds all of that. An ancient story about separation and desire. A conversation between friends. A drawing that waited. A body that welcomed it.

Nothing here belongs to only one person, and that is exactly what makes the tattoo feel complete.

Text by noTATTOO Berlin.

References:

Anselm Feuerbach, “Das Gastmahl” (2nd version, 1874). On the left, the drunk Alkibiades, standing in the centre, the host Agathon, on the right Socrates and Aristophanes.

The face of the opera singer Lina Cavalieri, Piero Fornasetti's muse.

jorge cruz
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