Cancer Zodiac Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a cancer tattoo means

Cancer is the sign of home. Astrology gives it care, memory, loyalty to family and a protective streak, along with the crab's habit of pulling back into its shell when hurt. People who wear it mostly mean the first half, the carer and keeper of the house, and the shell is the image that joins both: something soft that has learned to carry its own armour.

In the sky it is the faintest of the twelve. No star in it is brighter than magnitude 3.5, and from a city it can vanish entirely. The figure is an upside-down Y. A stem runs down from Iota Cancri through the two stars called the Aselli, the donkeys, then forks to Acubens, whose name comes from the Arabic for the claws, and to Tarf, the brightest star in the group. Look for it on late winter and spring evenings from the northern hemisphere, about halfway between Pollux in Gemini and Regulus in Leo.

Between the donkeys sits the Beehive, a cluster of hundreds of stars that shows as a faint grey smudge to the naked eye under a dark sky. Ancient writers called it the Manger, Praesepe in Latin, which is why the stars on either side are donkeys feeding at it. Galileo turned his telescope on it and counted more than forty stars, published in 1610. The stick figure used for charts does not include the cluster, so it has to be asked for.

The glyph is two small circles with tails curling towards each other, one circle above and to the left, the other below and to the right. It is most often explained as the crab's two claws; some read it as two breasts, tied to the sign's ruler, the Moon, and to its reputation for nurture. The Moon is why crescents appear beside the glyph on this page. Water, its element, accounts for the tide pool, the pearls set in the circles and the downward triangle that is the alchemical sign for water.

Where the design comes from

The crab has a small part in a large story. When Heracles fought the Hydra in the marsh at Lerna, his second labour, Hera sent a crab called Karkinos to bite his foot; he crushed it, and Hera, who hated him, set it among the stars for its trouble. The name then passed into geography. The Tropic of Cancer marks where the Sun stands overhead at the June solstice, and it was named when the Sun at that solstice lay in these stars, about two thousand years ago. Precession has since carried the solstice point west through Gemini and into Taurus, but the line on the map kept its name. Aratus, writing in the third century BC, used the Manger as a weather sign: if it faded on a night that looked clear, rain was on the way.

Choosing yours

• Orientation is the whole problem with this glyph. Lying on its side, one circle at the upper left and one at the lower right, it reads as the sign; turned upright it becomes the number 69, and strangers will see the number first. On a forearm or down the spine, where designs are usually turned to run along the limb, say at the stencil stage that this one stays horizontal.
• The constellation has only five main stars, so a chart is small and sparse: a stem and a fork. That makes it one of the easiest charts to put on skin at a small size and one of the least recognisable to anyone else. Most of the constellation designs here give it a setting that does the explaining, a crab drawn around the stars or a tide pool reflecting them, and that is worth copying if you want it read as the sign rather than as three lines.
• Some people born under the sign would rather not have the word on their skin, since it is also the name of an illness. The glyph, the crab and the chart all say the sign without it. The crab itself varies with the drawing: seen from above with claws raised it fills a square, while one drawn in a single continuous line holds at 4 or 5 cm.

Common questions