Candle Tattoos: Vigil Lights and Memento Mori

What a candle tattoo means

Of all the memento mori objects, the candle is the one that measures. A skull says you will die; a candle says how much is left, and it spends itself doing the thing it is for, giving light by burning down. Shakespeare put the whole idea into four words when Macbeth hears that his wife is dead: out, out, brief candle. A tall new candle, a stub, a guttering flame and a wick still smoking after it has been blown out are four points on the same line, and which one you choose says where on it you mean to stand.

A lit candle is also a vigil, and that is the reading most candle tattoos carry now. Catholic churches keep candles burning before the saints, lit by people asking for something or remembering someone. In Mexico and across the United States the tall glass veladora, printed with a saint or the Virgin of Guadalupe, is sold in grocery stores and burns for about a week. Jewish families light a yahrzeit candle that lasts a full day on the anniversary of a death, and on the Día de Muertos ofrenda candles light the dead back home. In each case the flame is kept for someone, which is why a candle with a name beside it reads as a memorial without needing a skull.

Santa Muerte is petitioned with candles more than with anything else, and the colour of the candle, like the colour of her robe, names the request: red for love, gold for money, black for protection, white for gratitude and cleansing. Several designs here put lit candles in her hands or in a half-circle around her crowned skull, which is how her altars look. A black candle on a Halloween or witchy flash sheet is simply spooky, and the sheet it sits on tells people which you mean.

Where the design comes from

Dutch vanitas still lifes of the seventeenth century, many painted in Leiden, set a guttering or snuffed candle beside a skull, an hourglass and a book, and Georges de La Tour painted Mary Magdalene more than once in the dark beside a single flame, her hand on a skull. In tattooing the candle arrives by two routes the designs here still show: black and grey memento mori, and Chicano work, where the glass veladora comes from the household altar.

Choosing yours

• Decide whether the candle is lit or out. Burning, it is a life or a vigil still going on; snuffed, with a thread of smoke rising, it is a death, and the smoke can carry a skull or a name.
• Leave the flame as skin. In black and grey the brightest thing a tattoo can show is unshaded skin, so the flame depends entirely on the darkness packed around it; white ink over a flame drifts toward yellow within a few years.
• Run the drips with gravity as the limb hangs: along a forearm or calf, never sideways across a thigh.

Common questions