A Documentary Film · 2026
Until We Meet Again
Memories on the Body
A 30-minute observational documentary on memorial tattooing as a mourning practice in contemporary Greece.
Filmed in Athens and Thessaly, January–March 2026.
The body as an archive of grief
Until We Meet Again follows one tattoo artist and four of her clients across memorial tattoo sessions in Athens and Larisa. Made as part of a multimodal ethnographic thesis at Leiden University, the film uses long-take observational cinema to hold what written analysis cannot replicate — the rhythm of the needle, the shifts between grief and laughter, the body encountering its own marked surface in real time.
Memorial tattoos in Greece sit at an uneasy intersection between secular body modification and Orthodox mourning tradition. Where the mnimosyna: calendared collective rites cannot accommodate private, granular grief, the tattooed mark steps in. This film documents that negotiation.
Three tattoos, three ways of carrying the dead
A fine-lined, slightly bulbous ceramic vase, deliberately unremarkable, the kind found on a Greek kitchen windowsill. Her mother had always placed a fresh carnation in it. Katerina kept doing it without noticing, until she noticed she had stopped.
“I had forgotten this tiny ritual. I didn’t want to forget it again.”
Her grandfather’s handwriting, traced from a letter he wrote while still alive, inscribed over her heart. Beneath it: 24 years, 9 months, 24 hours — the exact duration of their shared time. Her hand moves there automatically whenever she misses him.
“A photo is something you take. This is written by him, his own handwriting. It’s like a touch from him.”
Three inscriptions placed five days after her father’s death, before the nine-day Orthodox rite: Until We Meet Again in fine script, a five-pointed star (“he always called me his star”), and the angel number 444 on her wrist. Visible with every gesture.
“I wanted to see them every day, every hour. That’s the point.”
Dione
Dione’s studio is located in central Athens. She specialises in memorial work, a practice she situates in a lineage from her grandmother’s embroidery to her father’s icon painting to her own needlework. For memorial sessions, she moves more slowly, makes coffee first, and adjusts the lighting. Not as a deliberate ritual decision, but as care.
Her labour is dual: the technical precision of inscription and the affective work of holding her clients’ grief, entering it without living it as they do, and without taking it away.
Observational cinema as research
The film was shot handheld with long, uninterrupted takes. Cutting during a tattoo session would destroy what matters: the micro-temporalities of pain, speech, and silence, the pause before the next pass of the needle, the shift from grief to laughter and back. Following Metje Postma and Anna Grimshaw, the camera’s sustained attention is itself a form of knowledge; it holds corporeal understanding that written analysis can only describe.
The companion thesis, Until We Meet Again (MSc Visual Ethnography, Leiden University, 2026), theorises tattoo-based elicitation as a distinct method within sensory ethnography. The film and article are designed as two halves of one argument, neither substitutes for the other.