Poseidon
Calm on the surface, wild underneath.
Made in VOE Berlin for @phxpp.
A year after we made this tattoo, it healed into the skin exactly the way I hoped it would.
That’s one of my favorite parts of tattooing — coming back to a piece after time has passed and seeing how it has settled. How the lines soften slightly. How the contrast finds its balance. How the tattoo stops feeling new and starts feeling inevitable, like it’s always belonged there. It’s as if the image slowly reveals its real personality, once the skin has fully accepted it.
This piece came from a statue in Rome — a massive depiction of Poseidon that immediately carried the feeling I was looking for. Strong, composed, almost serene at first glance. The posture is stable, grounded. The anatomy is classical, confident, resolved. But the longer you look, the more something else begins to surface.
There’s tension in the expression.
A wildness held just beneath control.
That contradiction is what pulled me in.
I’ve always been drawn to Poseidon not simply as the god of the sea, but as a figure built entirely out of opposites. When the gods divided the world, Zeus took the sky, Hades took the underworld, and Poseidon chose the ocean — not land, not something fixed, but movement itself. Depth. Instability. A territory that never fully settles.
His trident was never just a symbol. It wasn’t decoration. It was an instrument of change. With it, he could raise storms, split the earth, calm waters, or destroy coastlines. In myth, he appears constantly — challenging Athena for the city of Athens, shaping shores, fathering heroes and monsters, disrupting journeys, punishing arrogance, restoring balance when it suited him. He’s everywhere, and he’s unpredictable.
But what stays with me isn’t the drama of those stories. It’s the duality underneath them.
The calm surface and the chaos below.
The beauty and the danger.
The invitation and the threat.
Poseidon isn’t rage all the time. He doesn’t shout constantly. Often, he waits. Still. Watchful. Contained. And that restraint is what makes the violence possible when it finally arrives. The power isn’t loud — it’s stored.
The sea behaves in the same way.
Most of the time, it appears peaceful. Flat. Reflective. Almost gentle. But that calm is never a guarantee. It can shift without warning. What looks inviting can become overwhelming in seconds. The same surface that holds you can pull you under. Quiet — until it isn’t.
That’s the feeling I wanted to bring into the tattoo.
Not just the anatomy of a classical statue. Not just muscle, proportion, or posture. But that moment right before release. The sensation of something immense being held in place. Like the second before a wave breaks. When everything is still, but nothing is safe.
Over time, as the tattoo healed and softened into the skin, that tension became clearer to me. The image didn’t lose strength — it gained depth. It stopped being a representation and became a presence.
That’s when I know a tattoo has found its place.
When it no longer tries to impress.
When it simply exists.
A reminder that some myths don’t disappear — they just move into new bodies. Sometimes onto skin.
nOT
References:
Musei Capitolini (main reference): https://www.museicapitolini.org/en/collezioni/percorsi_per_sale/palazzo_nuovo/sala_di_poseidone/statua_colossale_di_poseidone
Additional visual documentation: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Poseidon_statue_(Palazzo_Nuovo,_Rome
More context about Poseidon in mythology: https://www.theoi.com/Olympios/Poseidon.html
Brief overview of his symbols and stories: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Poseidon-Greek-mythology
About the original statue
The reference for this tattoo comes from a marble statue of Poseidon housed in the Capitoline Museums in Rome, displayed in the Palazzo Nuovo. It sits in one of those quiet rooms lined with classical sculptures, where sound feels softened by stone and time. You walk in, and he’s simply there — tall, steady, occupying space without demanding it. Somehow both fully present and slightly distant at the same time.
The statue presents Poseidon in the way ancient sculptors often approached power: calm, composed, restrained. He stands upright, strong, the trident held firmly but without drama. There’s no storm raging around him. No wave breaking at his feet. No sense of action unfolding. Instead, the pose feels suspended — like the exact moment before something shifts.
That’s what gives the figure its tension.
The face is serene, almost gentle at first glance. The expression doesn’t shout authority or aggression. But if you stay with it for a moment, you start to feel the weight behind it. A kind of gravity that makes you slow down. It’s the stillness of something that doesn’t need to prove its strength. Controlled power, held in place.
Ancient artists were masters of this balance. They understood that restraint could carry more force than spectacle. By choosing not to show violence, they let the possibility of it linger instead. The result is a figure that feels more unsettling than dramatic — calm, but never passive.
What deepens the experience even further is the space around the statue. Palazzo Nuovo is filled with marble figures from Greece and Rome: emperors, gods, heroes, philosophers, anonymous citizens. Faces frozen mid-thought. Bodies carved to last longer than the cultures that produced them. Walking through those long galleries feels like moving through a dense conversation about power, identity, nature, and the divine.
Within that context, Poseidon doesn’t dominate the room. He participates in it. He stands among equals, part of a broader system of images through which the ancient world tried to understand itself. Power wasn’t just something to be feared — it was something to be observed, measured, shaped into form.
Like many classical sculptures, the origins of this statue remain uncertain. No signature. No definitive record of who carved it or where it originally stood. It may have been moved, reused, restored, or copied from an earlier Greek model. That was common. These figures traveled, changed hands, changed meanings. They survived not as fixed objects, but as fragments of a longer visual language.
That uncertainty doesn’t weaken the statue. If anything, it strengthens it.
Without a clear origin story, you’re left with the figure itself. The posture. The expression. The quiet authority of carved stone. Nothing else distracts from the encounter. No narrative instructions. No context you’re required to accept. Just the presence of something that has endured.
Standing there, you don’t feel like you’re looking at an illustration of a god. You feel like you’re meeting an idea — one that has outlived its makers. A distilled version of how power, nature, and restraint were once imagined.
That’s what made it such a strong reference.
Not because it explains Poseidon — but because it leaves space around him. Space for tension. Space for interpretation. Space for that quiet moment before everything moves again.
nOT
