Constellation Tattoo Ideas and Real Star Charts

What a constellation tattoo means

Most constellation tattoos mark a person rather than the sky: a birth sign drawn as its stars instead of its glyph, the stars that stood over a town on the night of a birth or a death, or one named star. The sky makes a good record because it can be recomputed for any date and place.

The birth-sign version has a catch. On your birthday the Sun stands in or next to your sign's constellation, so those stars were up in daylight and invisible, and the pattern overhead that night belonged to the far side of the zodiac. Precession has also pulled the signs and their constellations apart by most of a constellation's width since Babylonian astronomers laid the zodiac out. None of that makes a sign chart wrong; it makes it a symbol of the sign, where a birth-sky chart is a record of one night.

Only a handful of constellations resemble their names. Scorpius does, a hooked tail with red Antares at the heart, and the Sickle of Leo makes a passable mane. Most do not, because the names are older than any agreed way of joining the dots. Ptolemy placed each star by where it fell in an imagined figure, the star in the heart, the one at the tip of the tail, and the stars never traced that figure. The Great Bear shows it best: its seven brightest stars, the Plough, are the hindquarters and a long tail no real bear has. In 1952 H.A. Rey, better known for Curious George, redrew the lines in The Stars so that each figure looked like its name.

The designs here are mostly zodiac constellations, some bare and some set inside a scene: Scorpius reversed out of a black cat, Gemini on a full moon between two cranes, Virgo in half of a gold locket, Taurus in a hand mirror.

Where the design comes from

The eighty-eight constellations are an agreement, not a discovery. The International Astronomical Union adopted the list in Rome in 1922, and the Belgian astronomer Eugène Delporte drew their boundaries, published in 1930. The IAU defines areas and never lines, so no stick figure is official; the charts here follow the figures the IAU publishes with Sky & Telescope magazine, and star positions from the Hipparcos satellite.

Choosing yours

• Brightness decides the size of each dot. Astronomers measure it in magnitudes, and since Norman Pogson fixed the scale in 1856 five magnitudes have meant exactly a hundred times the light. Three or four dot sizes keep the brightest star recognisable; one size for all reads as a pattern of pins.
• Keep north at the top and east on the left, because you look up at the sky from inside; a figure copied from a celestial globe comes out reversed. Turning a chart is harmless, since the sky wheels through the night anyway. Flipping it is not: a mirrored figure matches nothing overhead.
• On a small tattoo drop the faintest stars, but leave every other one exactly where it is.

Common questions