Peculiar Nature of Vases
There’s something quietly strange about porcelain.
Porcelain is everywhere, but it never fully disappears into the background. It’s designed to be functional — plates, cups, tiles, vessels — yet it always feels slightly unsuited for daily use. Too delicate. Too easy to chip or crack. One careless movement and it’s damaged. One fall and it’s gone.
And still, we treat it as something precious.
Porcelain is displayed rather than used. Stored in cabinets. Passed down through families. Wrapped carefully, handled slowly. It asks for attention without demanding it. Gentle hands. Soft cloths. The right shelf. The right light. It doesn’t announce itself, but it doesn’t hide either. It carries a quiet kind of authority — fragile, but persistent.
There’s a contradiction built into it. Porcelain pretends to be practical, but it isn’t. Or maybe it simply refuses to prove its worth through utility alone. It exists as it is: fine, breakable, ornamental, present. High-maintenance in ways we don’t always admit. That tension is part of what makes it compelling.
Over the years, I’ve tattooed porcelain many times, especially vases. It became one of the recurring motifs in my work early on, without me consciously planning it. The form kept returning. Sometimes requested. Sometimes emerging naturally in conversations with clients. Over time, it became clear that this wasn’t incidental. The image was carrying something I hadn’t finished thinking through.
Part of that pull comes from history. In classical European cultures, pottery wasn’t just functional. Greek and Roman vases, for example, were surfaces for storytelling. They carried scenes of myth, ritual, labor, intimacy, violence, devotion. A vessel wasn’t neutral. It held memory. It marked events. It moved between hands and generations. Even when broken, it remained legible.
That history lingers. A crack in porcelain doesn’t erase it. It adds another layer. Damage doesn’t cancel meaning — it records it. The object survives differently.
That idea translates strongly to tattooing. Porcelain, by nature, is fragile. Skin, by nature, ages, moves, changes. Tattooing porcelain fixes something delicate into something living. It makes fragility permanent without pretending it’s indestructible. The contradiction remains — and that’s the point.
When I tattoo porcelain, especially vases, I’m not interested in decoration alone. The focus is on structure, balance, and restraint. Clean lines. Controlled shading. Enough detail to suggest refinement, but not so much that the image collapses under its own weight. Like porcelain itself, the tattoo needs space. It needs to breathe.
What keeps drawing me back to the motif is how it resists usefulness. In a world obsessed with efficiency, productivity, and optimization, porcelain doesn’t adapt. It doesn’t try to become practical. It accepts its own limitations. It stays delicate. Slightly impractical. Vulnerable by design.
And yet, it survives.
That feels important. Not everything needs to justify itself through function. Some things exist to be held carefully. To be protected. To hold meaning rather than utility. Porcelain does that quietly. Without argument.
Tattooing it is a way of acknowledging that value. Preserving something fragile without hardening it. Allowing it to remain what it is, just carried on a different surface.
Delicate. Breakable. Still present.
Still holding space.
Maybe that’s enough.
text by Berna Valada 2020
