Toi-Toi Toilets and the Berlin Soul
A love letter to a city forever under construction.
by nOT
@notattoo_berlin
@notattoo_berlin
@notattoo_berlin
There are certain stories that could only come from one place. They do not translate perfectly, and they do not need to. They exist because of their setting, shaped by it and inseparable from it. For me, this is one of those stories — a strange, funny, and unexpectedly accurate portrait of Berlin.
A client once came to me with a very specific request: she wanted a tattoo of a Toi Toi toilet.
Toi Toi toilets are portable plastic toilets, the kind you see at music festivals, construction sites, demonstrations, temporary events, and anywhere a city is being used before it has finished organising itself. They are basic, industrial, and almost invisible because they are so familiar. They belong to the visual noise of a place in motion. No one usually thinks of them as symbolic, and that is exactly what made the request interesting.
She was not joking. She was genuinely fascinated by them. She even had an Instagram account where she posted photographs of every Toi Toi she came across, collecting them the way other people collect architecture, graffiti, or street details. When she asked me to tattoo one, something changed. I started seeing them everywhere, not as background objects, but as part of the rhythm of the city.
Their design has existed for decades and changed slowly over time. I ended up sketching three versions: an older model with a squared, almost outhouse-like structure, a mid-era version, and the smoother contemporary form. She chose the first one, and we tattooed it immediately.
Then something unexpected happened. I posted the two unused designs on Instagram without any real intention behind it, and within a few days two more people contacted me. Each one wanted a different version of the Toi Toi. Within a single week, all three models had become tattoos on three different people. What began as a single absurd request quietly turned into a small trilogy.
That made me pause. Why would this image — a plastic, functional, anonymous box — speak to people enough that they wanted to carry it permanently on their skin?
I think the answer has everything to do with Berlin.
This city is permanently unfinished. Buildings rise, disappear, and rise again. Streets are opened, repaired, redirected, and opened again. Neighbourhoods change identity before anyone has fully understood the previous one. Construction sites are not interruptions to the city; they are part of its normal condition. Berlin rarely pretends to be polished. It lives inside transition, and much of its character comes from that rawness.
In that context, the Toi Toi becomes more than a portable toilet. It becomes a marker of activity. It appears when something is being built, dismantled, occupied, celebrated, protested, or temporarily inhabited. It does not try to be beautiful or iconic. It simply appears wherever transformation is happening. It belongs to the temporary structures that allow life to continue while everything else is still becoming.
That is why the image felt so right here. Berlin has always attracted people who live comfortably in the unfinished: artists, migrants, outsiders, wanderers, people starting over, people opting out, people building something before permission fully arrives. Clubs in abandoned buildings, galleries in improvised spaces, bars that feel temporary for twenty years, creativity growing inside cracks rather than polished surfaces.
A Toi Toi tattoo is funny, of course. It should be. But it is not only a joke. It points toward something usually ignored and says: this is also part of the city. This is also where life happens. It honours the makeshift, the practical, the temporary, and the structures that quietly hold everything together while the bigger picture is still under construction.
At first glance, it may seem absurd: a portable toilet as a tattoo. But in Berlin, absurdity often becomes a form of accuracy. The Toi Toi becomes a marker of place, a symbol of transition, and a small love letter to a city that is always being built, repaired, interrupted, and used before it is finished.
Sometimes what lasts is not what looks permanent. Sometimes it is what keeps showing up, no matter how unfinished everything else remains.
Text by noTATTOO Berlin.
