“Skin as Testimony” — A Conversation with Tattoo Artist Mané Diás

New Embodiment, Vulnerability, and Personal Mythology in Tattooing During Wartime

Mané Dias is an artist of Armenian origin from Kyiv who works in the medium of tattoo. Despite the war, she stayed in the city for a long time—working and developing the narrative of her tattoo projects, which she later began taking across Europe. Her work found recognition in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Warsaw, and Amsterdam. She now lives and works in California, where she relocated at the end of 2024.

Her style and the themes of her work were shaped by a period of intense inner and outer turbulence. They carry a strong psychological dimension and speak through archetypes that resonate with the viewer on a subconscious, searching level.

In contemporary culture, tattooing is a widespread way of voluntarily transforming one’s body. For many, it’s a form of adornment, self-acceptance, or a way to feel part of a larger current. For me, tattoo art has always been, first of all, about art — an exclusive way to express my vision and communicate with collectors on a personal, almost intimate level.

The war [in Ukraine] became a turning point for me as a tattoo artist. My perception shifted: the body was no longer a given — it became a survival tool, an instrument that makes endurance possible. Facing the vulnerability of the body also exposed another fragility — the psychic one. Safety ceased to be physical and became a matter of surviving within.

Tattooing makes the body active, conscious. It’s a return to oneself through controlled pain, through the decision to feel that pain on your own terms. In that process, the body ceases to be an object and becomes a sovereign subject in its own right. To me, the images that remain on the skin after such an intentional session take on a ritual quality: they are memories of vulnerability and fear that a person has managed to face and overcome — for the sake of building an inner mythology.

That mythology became the central motif in my sketches. In a world of brutal rationalism, where war still overrides logic, the need to make sense of the irrational became unavoidable. My vision of the world, and of myself within it, had to go through a transformation — but more than that, it had to be rebuilt from scratch. That’s how I began to draw sentimental, erotic, and mystical imagery; not personal, but deeply intimate on an archetypal level. So that anyone who sees it might recognize their own story in it.

The erotic symbols in my sketches often refer to a primal perception of the world — of energy itself. They aren’t meant to be intellectually decoded, but intuitively felt: like a dream that leaves a mark on the skin, or a memory created in the shared ritual of a session. The body, from a fragile vessel, becomes living sacred matter — capable of transformation, capable of carrying pain as meaningful experience.

You can find Mané on Instagram @themanedias and at themanedias.com.