Neles back-WorkinProgress

Written By jorge cruz

The architecture seemed to dissolve.

Chiesa di Sant’ Ignazio, Rome

The first time I looked up at the ceiling of Chiesa di Sant’Ignazio in Rome, it wasn’t immediately clear where architecture ended and illusion began. The stone structure seemed to dissolve. Columns extended beyond their physical limits, and painted figures hovered in an open sky that felt continuous rather than enclosed.

The ceiling was painted by Andrea Pozzo, and its effect depends entirely on perception. Nothing actually opens above you. The surface is flat. But for a moment, that fact becomes secondary. What matters is the sensation of structure giving way to space.

The figures do not read as distant or unreachable. They appear suspended, close, almost accessible from the right position. The ceiling does not press downward. It expands upward, transforming the boundary between physical construction and imagined depth.

That image stayed with me and eventually entered my work.

A client came to me for her first tattoo, a full back piece. She chose a whale from my catalogue — a stable image, calm, heavy, and grounded. While working on the composition, I kept returning to the memory of Pozzo’s ceiling. I started to imagine the whale not as something anchored, but as something drifting through a space where architecture and sky become difficult to separate.

I reworked the design, placing the whale inside a loose, sketch-like interpretation of Pozzo’s illusion. The architectural lines were suggested rather than defined. The goal was never to recreate the ceiling itself, but to translate its logic: a space without fixed edges, where orientation becomes uncertain and movement feels suspended.

The tattoo remains unfinished. We paused before it was complete.

That incompletion feels appropriate. Some images do not resolve themselves all at once. They remain open, provisional, still becoming. In that sense, the unfinished tattoo feels surprisingly close to the experience of standing beneath Pozzo’s ceiling. Neither offers a final answer. Both depend on the viewer's willingness to remain with uncertainty.

This tattoo was made at Flourish Studio in Lisbon. The studio no longer exists, but the work created there continues to circulate through the pieces that remain.

Text by noTATTOO Berlin.

references:

jorge cruz
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