Angel of Death Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a angel of death tattoo means

The angel of death is a messenger, not a harvester. Where the reaper arrives to cut, the angel is sent to fetch, and it comes for each soul at its appointed hour. That is why people who wear one rarely mean fear. Most mean that someone they loved was not alone at the end, or that death, when it comes, will be a guide rather than a stranger.

The Hebrew Bible gives it a sword. The destroyer passes over the marked doors of the Israelites in Exodus, and in the First Book of Chronicles an angel stands between earth and heaven with a drawn sword stretched out over Jerusalem. The Talmud adds eyes: in tractate Avodah Zarah the angel of death is full of eyes and stands over the dying with its sword drawn and a bitter drop hanging from the point. The designs here that plant a sword point down beside a grave belong to that line.

Islam gives it a name. The Quran speaks only of the angel of death put in charge of each person; later tradition calls him Azrael, from a Hebrew name meaning God has helped, and pictures him as vast, many-winged and covered in eyes, as many as there are living people. The small hooded figure between wide wings, every feather marked with an eye, draws on that picture, and the mirrored Azrael with four wings is shorthand for the many.

The gentler figure is Greek, then Victorian. Classical art showed Death as a winged youth, the twin brother of Sleep, and the torch he holds upside down, flame to the ground, is a life put out. Nineteenth-century cemeteries filled with his descendants: veiled women bowing over tombs, laying lilies and roses, holding candles low. On this page that mourning angel is the commonest version, and the natural choice for a memorial.

Where the design comes from

In 1769 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing published How the Ancients Represented Death, arguing that Greek and Roman artists showed death not as a skeleton but as a winged youth with a lowered torch, an idea that passed into cemetery stone on both sides of the Atlantic. William Wetmore Story's Angel of Grief of 1894, flung face down over the grave of his wife Emelyn in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, is the model for the weeping stone angel here. Daniel Chester French's Milmore Memorial of 1893 in Boston shows the angel of death stopping a young sculptor's hand, poppies for the long sleep in her other hand; Barcelona's Kiss of Death of 1930 has a winged skeleton kiss a dying young man, a scene the feathered angel here gives a woman's face and braided hair.

Choosing yours

• Decide between angel and reaper first. Feathered wings, a veil or a bowed head make an angel; a scythe belongs to the reaper, and the young woman here holding one with grey wings behind her is a hybrid of both. Put a skull under the hood and most people will see the grim reaper, wings or not.
• Let the wings set the size. Spread wide, as on the eyed Azrael and the angel in flight, they want a broad field; folded round the body like a cloak, as on the watercolour angel crowned with poppies, they fit a forearm or a calf.
• Keep what the figure holds legible. An hourglass, a lantern, a candle and a lowered torch each change the meaning, and below about 12 cm there is room for only one.

Common questions