Capricorn Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a capricorn tattoo means

Capricorn is a creature that exists nowhere else, the front half a goat and the back half a fish, and the reading most people mean comes straight out of that body. A goat climbs where nothing else can; a fish survives in the deep; an animal at home at both extremes stands for ambition reached slowly, for endurance, and for the patience to get to the top the long way round.

The constellation, Capricornus, is the smallest in the zodiac and one of the faintest. Its brightest star is Deneb Algedi, Arabic for the tail of the goat, and it is only just brighter than third magnitude. At the head end, Algedi is a pair that separates to the naked eye, although the two stars have nothing to do with each other: one is about a hundred light years away and the other more than five times as far. Joined as a stick figure, the stars make a wide, lopsided triangle that most people describe as a grin or the hull of a boat rather than as any animal.

The glyph is one continuous stroke: a small hook at the top left, a narrow V, a tall right arm that comes back down and curls into a small closed loop, and a short tail. It is usually read as the animal compressed, with the horns and head in the V and the fish in the loop and tail, and one explanation traces it to the Greek letters tau and rho, the start of tragos, goat. Typefaces draw it in several quite different ways, so bring the version you want rather than asking for the symbol by name.

Saturn rules the sign in traditional astrology, and Saturn brings time with it: discipline, limits and long waiting. That is why the hourglass and the goat skull sit so naturally beside it, and why a sprig of pine growing through a skull, evergreen out of bone, reads as this sign's particular version of renewal.

Where the design comes from

The goat-fish is Babylonian and one of the oldest figures in the zodiac. Their star catalogues call it the goat-fish outright, and it was the emblem of Ea, the god of fresh water and wisdom known in Sumerian as Enki, carved on boundary stones long before any Greek story was attached to it. The story that came later has Pan leaping into a river to escape the monster Typhon and changing only halfway, a goat above the water and a fish below. Rome took the sign up as politics: Suetonius says Augustus published his horoscope and struck a silver coin stamped with the sea-goat, which stayed an imperial emblem for centuries. The Tropic of Capricorn is named after the constellation because the Sun stood in these stars at the December solstice when the tropics were named; precession has since carried the solstice into Sagittarius.

Choosing yours

• Make the tail unmistakably a fish. Scales, a finned tip and at least one full coil are what separate the sea-goat from a goat, and without them the drawing is simply a goat; put tightly curling horns on top and it drifts toward Aries instead. The fish half is the half that carries the sign.
• The coil is the best shape in the design and its biggest demand. A tail that turns once around itself needs length, so the sea-goat suits a long field; forced into a tight spiral at small size, the scales fill in and the coil closes. Give the scales room, or drop them for a smooth tail with a clean fin.
• The looped glyph is the hardest of the twelve to draw well. The loop is the crux: closed and small, it reads as the sign; opened up or enlarged, the stroke starts to look like the letters V and b. Check it on the stencil at the real size, not on a screen. Where the constellation is drawn as dots, each one here is placed where the Hipparcos satellite measured the star and sized by its brightness, so the grin is the real one.

Common questions