A Tattoo Artist Turned His Three-Year-Old Daughter’s Chalk Drawings Into A Poster For The Cure’s Berlin Concerts

For more than 45 years, The Cure has built one of the most distinctive visual identities in music. Long before fans hear the first note of a new album, they often recognize the band’s world through its artwork, dreamlike imagery, imperfect lines, faded colors, childhood memories, melancholy, and quiet optimism existing side by side. Whether on album covers, stage design, or tour posters, the visuals have always reflected the same emotional complexity that defines Robert Smith’s songwriting.

That makes the artwork created for the band’s Berlin concerts feel like an unexpectedly natural addition to The Cure’s history. Rather than commissioning a conventional illustration, internationally renowned tattoo artist Chaim Machlev, better known as DotsToLines, built the entire design from chalk drawings made by his three-year-old daughter, Echo. What began as an afternoon spent drawing together on a California driveway eventually became one of the most unusual pieces of artwork produced for the band’s current tour.

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The Cure has long treated concert posters as part of the music itself

Image credits: Chaim Machlev

For decades, The Cure has understood that a concert doesn’t begin when the lights go down. Album covers, stage design, typography, photography, and tour posters have always formed part of the band’s identity, helping shape the emotional atmosphere long before Robert Smith sings the first lyric. Like the music itself, the artwork rarely offers straightforward answers. Instead, it leaves room for memory, imagination, nostalgia, and melancholy, qualities that have defined The Cure since the late 1970s.

Image credits: Chaim Machlev

That philosophy extends to the band’s current tour, where each city has received its own exclusive artwork rather than a single poster reused night after night. In an era when many concert posters become highly collectible, these limited editions have become visual time capsules, capturing not just where the band performed, but how that particular show was remembered. The Berlin edition, however, carries an origin unlike any other on the tour. It wasn’t conceived in a design studio or sketched in an artist’s notebook. It began as colorful chalk drawings covering the driveway outside a family home.

The finished artwork preserves the freedom of a child’s drawing while demanding extraordinary precision

Image credits: Chaim Machlev

Image credits: Chaim Machlev

When Chaim Machlev looked at the drawings his three-year-old daughter Echo had made in chalk, he didn’t see rough sketches waiting to be improved. He saw a complete visual language.

Rather than redrawing her ideas in his own style, he built the composition around them, preserving the uneven lines, unexpected shapes, and playful imperfections that adults often lose as they become more technically skilled. That decision made the project unusually demanding. Every spontaneous mark had to survive a production process that leaves almost no room for mistakes.

Image credits: Chaim Machlev

Image credits: Chaim Machlev

The final poster was produced as an eight-color hand-pulled screen print, where every color is printed separately using its own screen before the next layer can be added. Even the smallest misalignment can affect the finished image. A thick gloss varnish was then applied over The Cure logo, creating subtle texture that changes as light moves across the print. The result is a piece that feels simultaneously handmade, playful, and meticulously engineered.

The collaboration brings together two opposite ways of seeing the world

Image credits: Chaim Machlev

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the project is the contrast between its two creators. As one of the world’s best-known tattoo artists, Machlev has built his career on precision. Every line is permanent. Every proportion matters. Every decision must be carefully considered before the needle ever touches skin.

A three-year-old approaches drawing in exactly the opposite way. There are no rules about perspective or composition. Colors don’t need to stay inside the lines, and imagination isn’t limited by what seems realistic. Instead of replacing that freedom with technical perfection, Machlev chose to protect it. His role became less about correcting Echo’s drawings than translating them into another medium without losing the honesty that made them special in the first place.

The artwork feels like it belongs in The Cure’s world because it balances melancholy with innocence

Image credits: Chaim Machlev

What makes the Berlin poster resonate so naturally with The Cure isn’t simply that it was commissioned by the band. It’s the emotional language it speaks.

For more than four decades, Robert Smith has written songs where joy and sadness rarely exist separately. Childhood memories sit beside heartbreak. Wonder exists alongside loneliness. Beauty often emerges through imperfection rather than despite it.

Echo’s drawings introduce exactly that kind of emotional balance. Their spontaneity softens the darker undertones that have long defined The Cure’s aesthetic without diminishing them. Instead, they add something the band’s work has always quietly carried beneath the melancholy: curiosity, vulnerability, and hope.

Image credits: Chaim Machlev

For Machlev, the project also preserves something deeply personal. An ordinary afternoon spent drawing on a driveway with his daughter has become part of The Cure’s visual history, a reminder that some of the most meaningful works of art don’t begin with a commission or a deadline, but with time shared between two people.

The Berlin design is currently available exclusively at The Cure’s Berlin concerts as a limited-edition screen print and matching tour shirt. With posters already close to selling out, demand has extended well beyond concertgoers. While nothing has been confirmed yet, many fans are hoping for an additional online release. Anyone interested should keep an eye on the official channels of The Cure and DotsToLines, where any future availability will be announced.

Image credits: Chaim Machlev

Image credits: Chaim Machlev

The collaboration also extends beyond music and visual art. According to Machlev, all proceeds from sales of both the posters and shirts will be donated to charity, giving additional significance to a project that already began with a child’s imagination. What started as an afternoon of chalk drawings on a family driveway has evolved into official artwork for one of alternative music’s most influential bands, while ensuring that every poster and shirt sold contributes to a good cause.