Poseidon

12 Jan

Calm on the surface, wild underneath.

This tattoo was made at Visions of Ecstasy in Berlin for @phxpp.

A year after we made it, the tattoo had healed into the skin exactly the way I hoped it would. That is one of my favourite parts of tattooing: seeing a piece again after time has passed, when the lines have softened slightly, the contrast has settled, and the image no longer feels new. At a certain point, a good tattoo stops looking applied and starts looking inevitable, as if it had always belonged there.

The image came from a statue in Rome, a large classical depiction of Poseidon that immediately carried the feeling I was looking for. At first glance, the figure appears strong, composed, and almost serene. The posture is stable. The anatomy is classical and resolved. But the longer you look, the more something else begins to surface. There is tension in the expression, a kind of wildness held just beneath control.

That contradiction is what pulled me in.

I have always been drawn to Poseidon not only as the god of the sea, but as a figure built 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, force, and change. His trident was never only a symbol. It was an instrument capable of raising storms, splitting the earth, calming waters, or destroying coastlines. In myth, he appears as a god of power and interruption, shaping shores, disrupting journeys, punishing arrogance, and restoring balance when it suited him.

What interests me most is not the drama of those stories, but the duality underneath them. Poseidon is not rage all the time. He does not need to be constantly violent in order to be dangerous. Often, he waits. Still, watchful, contained. The power is not loud; it is stored. That restraint is exactly what makes the possibility of release feel so intense.

The sea behaves in the same way. Most of the time, it appears peaceful, 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 also pull you under. Quiet, until it is not.

That was the feeling I wanted to bring into the tattoo. Not only the anatomy of a classical statue, not only muscle, proportion, or posture, but the moment 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 fully safe.

Over time, as the tattoo healed and settled into the skin, that tension became clearer to me. The image did not lose strength. It gained depth. It stopped being only a representation of Poseidon and became a presence on the body.

That is when I know a tattoo has found its place: when it no longer needs to impress, when it simply exists. A reminder that some myths do not disappear. They move into new bodies, sometimes quietly, sometimes through skin.

Text by noTATTOO Berlin.

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 stands in one of those quiet rooms lined with classical sculptures, where sound feels softened by stone and time. You enter the space and he is simply there — tall, steady, occupying the room without demanding attention. Fully present, but slightly distant at the same time.

The statue presents Poseidon in the way ancient sculptors often approached power: calm, composed, and restrained. He stands upright, strong, with the trident held firmly but without drama. There is no storm around him, no wave breaking at his feet, no action unfolding. Instead, the pose feels suspended, as if the figure has been caught in the exact moment before something shifts.

That restraint is what gives the statue its tension. The face appears serene, almost gentle at first glance, but the longer you stay with it, the more weight begins to appear behind the expression. It is not the aggression of a god demonstrating his power, but the stillness of something that does not need to prove its strength. Controlled force, held in place.

Ancient artists understood that restraint could carry more intensity than spectacle. By choosing not to show violence, they allowed the possibility of it to remain present. The result is a figure that feels calm, but never passive. Poseidon does not dominate through movement. He dominates through containment.

The setting deepens that effect. Palazzo Nuovo is filled with marble figures from Greece and Rome: emperors, gods, heroes, philosophers, and anonymous citizens. Faces frozen mid-thought. Bodies carved to last longer than the cultures that produced them. Walking through those galleries feels like moving through a dense conversation about power, identity, nature, and the divine.

Within that context, Poseidon does not stand apart from the room. He participates in it. He belongs to a broader system of images through which the ancient world tried to understand itself. Power was not only something to be feared. It was something to be observed, measured, shaped, and given form.

Like many classical sculptures, the origins of this statue remain uncertain. There is no signature, no definitive record of who carved it, and no complete certainty about where it originally stood. It may have been moved, reused, restored, or copied from an earlier Greek model. That kind of movement was common. These figures travelled, changed hands, changed meanings, and survived not as fixed objects, but as fragments of a longer visual language.

That uncertainty does not weaken the statue. If anything, it makes the encounter more direct. Without a fixed origin story, what remains is the figure itself: the posture, the expression, the quiet authority of carved stone. Nothing else distracts from it. No narrative explanation is required. No single interpretation needs to close the image down.

Standing in front of it, you do not feel like you are looking at an illustration of a god. You feel like you are meeting an idea that has outlived its makers — a distilled version of how power, nature, restraint, and danger were once imagined.

That is what made it such a strong reference for the tattoo. Not because it explains Poseidon completely, but because it leaves space around him. Space for tension, for interpretation, and for the quiet moment before everything moves again.

Text by noTATTOO Berlin.