After receiving a heart tattoo in my style on the back of his left arm, Dan returned a year later asking me to create a matryoshka tattoo for the right side, one that could echo the same visual language and remain in dialogue with the first piece. As I usually do, I developed several designs, and this artwork is one of them. While designing it, I was drawn to the idea of the mask and to the tension between appearance and truth: the way beauty, so often praised on the surface, can conceal something far more fragile, distorted, or unsettling underneath. In this sense, the matryoshka became more than just a figure. It became a symbol of layers, illusion, and hidden realities, where what appears delicate or attractive on the outside may contain a much uglier and deeper truth within.

All this shaped in my mind UGLI