Gothic tattoo symbols and meanings
Seventeen motifs that define gothic tattoos, with their documented history kept apart from modern readings.
Skull
A gothic skull tattoo comes from the old European habit of keeping death in plain sight: memento mori, vanitas painting, churchyard stone. It is only ever as good as the anatomy under the ornament.
90 designs
Raven and crow
A raven tattoo carries two old stories at once: Odin's ravens of thought and memory, and Poe's midnight visitor croaking Nevermore. Drawn well, nobody mistakes it for a crow.
70 designs
Black rose
A black rose tattoo shows a flower that does not exist in nature, which is half its appeal. It takes the rose's long history of love and secrecy and turns it toward loss, endings and beauty that refuses to fade.
70 designs
Moth
A moth tattoo is the night side of the butterfly: drawn to light, short-lived and patterned in browns and greys. One species even carries a skull on its back, which made it a gothic favorite.
60 designs
Bat
A bat tattoo is one of the simplest ways to wear gothic: a creature of night, crypts and belfries, tied to Dracula in the West and to good fortune in China. It can be as small as a fingertip or as wide as your chest.
50 designs
Gothic cross
A gothic cross is a Christian cross dressed in the ornament of medieval stone and metalwork: trefoil tips, tracery, thorns and roses. Some people wear it as faith, some as gothic style, and good design works for both.
65 designs
Cathedral
A gothic cathedral tattoo puts eight centuries of stone on skin: pointed arches, rose windows, flying buttresses and spires. It is the most technically demanding gothic motif, and the one that most clearly shows where the word gothic began.
70 designs
Gargoyle
A gargoyle tattoo is a guardian with a day job. Real gargoyles are carved rainwater spouts, and the brooding winged figures most people picture are usually grotesques, many of them carved in the 1800s rather than the Middle Ages.
45 designs
Vampire
A vampire tattoo draws on two very different creatures: the swollen corpse of Balkan folklore and the elegant aristocrat of 19th-century fiction. Nearly every gothic vampire design belongs to the second.
45 designs
Grim reaper
A grim reaper tattoo shows death as a hooded skeleton with a scythe, an image that took shape in late medieval Europe after the Black Death. Today it is worn as much for courage and survival as for darkness.
55 designs
Memento mori
Memento mori is Latin for 'remember that you will die.' As a tattoo it usually takes the form of a skull, an hourglass, a burning candle or a stopped clock, objects borrowed from centuries of European art about time running out.
60 designs
Snake and dagger
A snake and dagger tattoo wraps a serpent around a blade. It is a staple of old American flash, and in gothic work it grows into skull pommels, filigree hilts and the ouroboros.
60 designs
Spider and web
Spider and web tattoos range from a tiny spider on a thread to a full web over the elbow. The elbow web has a real prison history worth knowing, but most people today wear webs for their geometry and gothic mood.
50 designs
Lace and filigree
A gothic lace tattoo uses the patterns of Victorian lace, filigree jewelry and crystal chandeliers as ornament on the skin. It carries less fixed symbolism than other motifs and much more technical risk, so design matters.
55 designs
Fallen angel
A fallen angel tattoo shows an angel cast out of heaven, usually with broken or darkened wings. The image comes from Christian scripture and Milton's Paradise Lost, and Victorian cemetery statues gave it its weeping, stone-carved look.
55 designs
Moon and occult
The crescent moon is the night sky's signature in gothic tattooing, from a single thin curve on the wrist to a triple moon or an alchemical sun and moon. Its meanings run from ancient goddesses to modern witchcraft.
55 designs
Victorian relics
A Victorian gothic tattoo borrows the objects of 19th-century mourning and domestic life: cameos, lockets, skeleton keys, coffins, oil lamps and hand mirrors. Most carry real history, and many were already about death and memory.
45 designs