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TattooLOG

References, processes and ideas that guide my tattoo work. It’s a space to give context and clarity to the style and the thinking behind the designs.

 

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The first time I looked up at the ceiling of the Chiesa di Sant’Ignazio in Rome, I couldn’t tell where the stone ended and the sky began. The architecture seemed to dissolve.

Chiesa di Sant’ Ignazio, Rome

The columns stretched higher than they should, and the painted figures floated in an endless sky. It’s all an illusion, but for a moment, it feels real. Andrea Pozzo didn’t just paint saints—he painted the moment when solid ground seems to disappear.

There’s something about the way the figures rise, pulled toward the light. They don’t feel far away—they seem to hang in the air, close enough that you could almost step into their world if you found the right angle. This ceiling doesn’t close you in—it opens you up. It makes you question where things start and where they end. Maybe the divine isn’t somewhere else. Maybe it’s just about seeing differently.

That image followed me back into my work. A client came to me wanting a full back tattoo—her very first. She had picked a whale from my catalogue, something steady, something calm. But I kept thinking about that ceiling. I imagined the whale drifting through a space like that—where sky and structure blur, where there are no hard edges. I redrew the whale inside a loose, sketch-like version of Pozzo’s illusion. It felt like the right place for it.

It’s a tattoo we never finished. Maybe we will. Maybe some tattoos are meant to stay that way—open, still moving, like the ceiling itself.

I made this tattoo at Flourish Studio in Lisbon, a place that shaped a lot of my early work and no longer exists—but somehow still lives in the pieces we created there.

notattoo_berlin

links of interest:

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